Category: Attention economy

Settle in: this one’s pretty long.

Hooboy! Did I ever let time get away from me as I collected items.

We’ve been getting it backward

I love this formulation: We’re not facing a blue wave on November 3; we’re facing a red undertow.

My own instinct is revulsion with Republican corruption, not enthusiasm for Democrats, who are pretty directionless. When Democrats do manifest a sense of direction, I’m generally inclined to disagree with them. I suspect I’m not alone. But I’ll be voting for a lot of them in five days.

The corruption of the Republicans needs a response outside the polls, too. Congresswoman Slotkin is directionally right about us needing deterring prosecutions (probably impeachments to avoid Trump’s pardons), but mustn’t make that our singular focus. Sarah Isgur suggests that a Democrat President in 2029 could help heal the land by naming a Republican Attorney General to focus on the worst of the worst corruption in the second Trump administration without the partisan taint.

If you think impeaching a Trump minion who’s no longer in power is a pointless gesture, you’re wrong: “conviction upon impeachment has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from ‘any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’” (David French)

Now, like Diogenes, we need to find among the Republicans, a man — a genuinely honest and virtuous person, to fill that role.

AI as God

[W]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

Public-facing, our AI Titans spin stories of endless pleasurable leisure as our AI underlings do all the work for us. In their digital smoke-filled rooms, they wonder what to do with all us useless eaters in their tech paradise.

Meanwhile, with the Lewis quote in mind, I think about the crypto-religious devotion to, and the totalizing potential of, Artificial General Intelligence. If it is achieved. It bodes to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (he who already meddles in war policy and is also into the AI game with Grok).

Therefore, be it resolved that listening to or reading the transcript of The Zealousness of the New Tech Right, Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, be highly recommended.

(If you need more incentive, be advised that when I went to save End-Times Fascism to my wish list, the Amazon algorithm suggested that I consider also If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies: Why Pausing AI is the Real Existential Threat. The Author? Grok 4.2, Elon Musk’s AI platform.)

Killer of thousands of the poorest children in the world

We don’t know the extent of the damage Musk did to one of the most efficient aid programs in history, PEPFAR, but we can say with full certainty that the richest man in the world is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of the poorest children in the world — almost certainly more than those killed in Gaza. And he carries the weight of this like all sociopaths. He feels it not at all.

And now it appears he deliberately exposed Ukraine to Russian aggression by secretly hobbling Starlink, the satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defenses. That’s a direct intervention in a hot war to benefit America’s enemy in Moscow. According to the WSJ, he ran it by Trump first, who agreed, but not Zelensky, further destroying what little trust the US has in world affairs. This week, Trump said it was back to normal but the Ukrainians insist the slowdown is still in place. Worse: there’s a real lack of accountability in how this decision was made and who exactly can reverse it.

But let’s just say that delegating military strategy to a private individual is a new low for our increasingly banana republic. The Dems should not be discouraged from getting to the bottom of these scandals as soon as they are able.

Andrew Sullivan, My Musk Problem And Ours

“Teaching you how to think”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

Unprecedented institutional threat

Hundreds of US lawyers have agreed to work for free on efforts to monitor next month’s midterm elections in what voting rights groups say is the biggest effort of its kind to prevent meddling at the polls. “I’ve been involved in election protection since 2004 [and] I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in the midterms before,” Seth Waxman, co-chair of WilmerHale’s Supreme Court practice and the former US solicitor-general, told the FT. “In the past there . . . wasn’t a widespread institutional threat. This year is categorically different.” (Source: ft.com)

John Ellis News Items citing and quoting Financial Times.

The threat, in my opinion, is mostly from Trump’s minions, who have internalized his bogus election fraud rhetoric by trying (and failing, I hope) to counterprogram some even bigger fraud.

I’ve read enough about election security to think that the most plausible way for Trump to sow distrust in the election is something like a declaration, ipse dixit, that there’s some lefty attack on some blue state elections and sending in goons to demand protective custody of the voting machines. (Oops! Apparently, Team MAGA has been thinking much harder than I about how to screw up an election).

If he doesn’t get them, MAGA America will say the election was corrupt and untrustworthy. If he does get them, sane America will say the election was corrupted by him and sub-optimal. Since he thrives on chaos, he wins either way.

What are they giving themselves permission to do?

I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.

…

The threat of imminent doom can excuse even the inexcusable.

That’s the logic of the end justifies any means. And that logic is a perennial aspect of politics. There are certain rare and extreme situations in which the end of bare survival (facing a genuine existential threat) does justify anything that can be done to protect against that threat being fulfilled. But what about engaging during an ordinary election campaign in absurd hyperbole, exaggeration, and outright lies to justify the judgment that we face an existential threat from them, which in turn is what justifies the anything-goes mentality? The Claremont faction has been engaged in just such threat inflation or expansion ever since Michael Anton published the “Flight 93 Election” essay (in September 2016), and now the entire leadership of the right, as well as its media echo chamber, is in on the game, giving itself one concocted extreme self-justification after another for a decade.

…

What are they giving themselves permission to do? The answer: Anything and everything necessary to protect themselves from suffering utter destruction at the hands of their mortal enemies (aka, losing an upcoming election).

Damon Linker

Are to classics too white?

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”…

Andrew Sullivan, The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics

If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist …

… I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate. From one of his classics:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Flat-out fake polling

[B]efore you dye your hair blue, you should know that tons and tons of polling you read is fake. Like, literally just fake. The latest here is a public opinion polling shop called Wedgewood Polling, which was cited on MS NOW and in The New York Times (places that would never lead us astray). Wedgewood made this statement on their now-terminated X account:

WEDGEWOOD POLLING, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry, makes this public statement. . . . Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.

Ha ha. Cool. You got us, Wedgewood! Why do I increasingly feel like we’re all a part of a YouTube prank show?

Nellie Bowles

Wish fulfilled

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.

Russell Vought, 2023

A hacking group leaked the names, phone numbers, and addresses of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and associates, including about 10,000 linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigative arm, some of them involved in undercover operations. DHS said it was aware of a “potential breach.”

TMD

Postliberalism

Readwise seems to have decided one recent day to give me a couple of postliberal-leaning “Daily Highlights” from my past reading:

Liberal democracy is more restrictive, being strongly correlated with egalitarian principles that are quite wrongly believed to generate diversity. The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

I am quite dubious about the concept of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong, we really are an exceptional nation; that’s even clearer to me from living abroad. But there’s a lot of hubris in that. We really believe somehow that we can defy the laws of history, that as long as we work hard and mean well, goodness will prevail.

Rod Dreher, Farewell to Hungary, And to Europe

For the record, I remain unconvinced that any of the postliberal or illiberal alternatives to liberal democracy would be an improvement. Insert your own criteria for the desiderata in relation to which “improvement” is measured. Mine are that Christians “may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.” But I’m trying to learn in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content..

October

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

Louise Gluck, October

Shorts

  • If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards. (Nick Catoggio of Sen. Jon Husted)
  • It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. (The late Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
  • I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (Simone Weil, Love in the Void)
  • Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. (M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived)
  • [I]f you see a man in skinny jeans and long necklaces leaping around with a light show behind him, well, that’s a man who wants to have sex with a lot of random people. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a rock band or talking about God. These are ancient mating dances. These are ancient male archetypes. (Nellie Bowles)
  • The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. (Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal)
  • Fundamentalist intellectual habits … have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. (Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • America’s wedded couples are far less likely to stay together than Sweden’s cohabiting couples are. (Gracy Olmstead, Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family)
  • We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs. (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Keeping the United States united

The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs is a very dubious human

If Barack Obama or any other prominent black participant in the big leagues of American politics had 13 CHILDREN OUT OF WEDLOCK with 4 DIFFERENT WOMEN, it would be all anyone could ever talk about. Most conservatives seem not even to know this about [Elon] Musk.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Keeping the United States united

The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability and willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their disagreements with their fellow Americans. You have to start from the position “no American is my enemy.” I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my enemy and I will impose restraints on myself.

…

Not much matters. The things that matter matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed by David Brooks.

Corruption then and now

In aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. In democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. The consequence is that in aristocratic States the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; whilst the reverse is the case in democratic nations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s observation may be reaching its expiration date, with avarice having become, in some quarters, insatiable.

More and less respectable conspiracy theories

⁠⁠If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes … traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.⁠⁠

Kevin D. Williamson

Attention

Attention is an indicator of love.
Not attending to what merits our love is indifference.
Attending to what does not merit our love is idolatry.
When businesses work hard to commodify our attention, we should consider who and what actually deserves it.

David O’Hara (who disclaims both originality and remembering where it all came from).

Can you recite a 7-digit phone number backward?

As we get older, we’re all going to lose a few of our marbles. As the word gets out that Parkinson’s disease is not just a movement disorder, there will be people whose careers will be destroyed because, on a particular day at a particular time, they can’t recite a seven-digit telephone number backward. Allowing someone’s fate to depend on performance on some test that has nothing to do with the job in question is just the reductio ad absurdum of the meritocratic machinery that has been pretty good to me (and to you, I suspect) over most of a lifetime.

Michael E. Kinsley, For Those Who Grow Old (originally titled Old Age)

Readwise

I’m a highlighter, a clipper, a curator. Digital life is very congenial to me. My blog posts here are full of digital clippings from my storehouses.

The trick is knowing how to manage highlights, and also to be reminded of things I once thought worthy of curation.

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years. There was a flat-file database manager for Mac, from the makers of Filemaker. I can’t even remember its name as I write. There was (and still is, I think) Evernote, which I suspect is a database manager with a diversionary user interface. Then there was DevonThink, another database manager. None of them gave me reminders of what I’d saved; nothing serendipitous ever happened. And then DevonThink crashed and made proprietary hash of much of my work.

I decided that I needed to keep things in plain text, or at least in Markdown (through which the target text would remain readily discernible in a worst-case app meltdown). On top of that text could live various tools. That led me to Obsidian, with which I’m pretty happy. I was on the path to Plaintextistan, I thought. But again, Obsidian didn’t give me surprising reminders of what I’d saved.

But darn it, a non-plaintext tool I had almost forgotten emerged from the mists: Readwise. Even worse, it’s web-based.

I’ve taken a little time to explore its nooks and crannies, and in recent months, it has become an integral part of my daily websurfing as well as a smart reminder of things I once noted but might forget. I’m pretty sure it has integrated AI so that the 15 daily highlights I’ve requested increasingly have a sort of theme woven through them (Tocqueville appeared in two of 15 items today). I find myself spending more time daily pondering the 15 items Readwise has surfaced and offered. My plain text commitment has faltered.

Readwise is not an instant panacea, but it’s not too time-consuming to set up.

  1. If you’ve highlighted your Kindle books and Apple Books, or if you’ve saved things to Instapaper (or maybe Pocket – I don’t recall if Pocket integrated), you’ve got a jump-start because it will import all that on request. It’s got a lot of other integrations.
  2. It also will do Optical Character Recognition on highlights from your paper books and put them in the system. This is through its smartphone app.
  3. It offers browser plugins to save web content; it’s gotten to the point that I put every interesting web item into it and read it there; if it seems upon reading to be ephemeral, I delete it then to avoid clutter; if it’s worthy, I’ll have highlighted along the way and can add tags quickly for future retrieval.

You might want to give it a look. Not surprisingly, Readwise describes itself better than my little endorsement.

Shorts

  • A society whose members know what is enough might be poor, but its members would be equally free. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
  • Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
  • What I called “the master wish” in this religion of wishful thinking went something like this: Please, Lord, let us keep driving to Walmart forever. (James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency)
  • Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism Sometimes, I think Wendell Berry and his agrarian friends were 21st Century America’s only true conservatives — and although they have my admiration, through long habit I don’t live like them.
  • The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • The kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets. (Paul Kingsnorth, via Brady Bowman)
  • Money can buy the megaphone, but it really can’t buy the mood that we see in the country. (Henrik Schatzinger, a political scientist at Ripon College, about the massive spending on next month’s election)
  • Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse. (Emmanuel Macron on the French riots)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

If you wanted to have a meaningful impact, you didn’t want to waste your vote on the weak and incompetent center. The Social Democrats were not enough to hold back the communist menace. Only the Nazis proved capable of reversing the leftward slide. If you believed the communists were the greater evil, you felt a moral duty to vote for the Nazis.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Rebarbarizing America

Nidal Malik Hasan

It’s always a pretty safe bet that anything Pete Hegseth does is performatively tough and morally indefensible. But my instant objection to livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan took the self-evident evil too much for granted.

And frankly, the evil has come into sharper focus for me since my first post. Not all of what I’m going to say now just was on my mind then.

I’m opposed to capital punishment, but I’m going to assume its permissibility for a moment. The evidence does not show that the death penalty deters others. (That is a more modest claim than “shows that it does not deter,” the claim I wanted to make before I did an AI fact-check.) Failure to deter — which presumably is the purpose to be enhanced by making it public — is my main reason for opposing streaming or broadcasting this execution. (That some sick-minded people will enjoy it, making themselves sicker for their enjoyment, is a second reason.)

Deterrence aside, the remaining purposes of criminal punishment usually cited are retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration/compensation. Capital punishment does not rehabilitate or restore, and it incapacitates whether or not it’s public. Finally, the retribution is equal whether the execution is public or hidden from public view.

I confess that I’ve said things against sanitizing capital punishment, and may have even spoken in favor of making it public. I’m definitely leaning the other way now, perhaps motivated by the very unsanitized feel of firing squads, or my general disgust with the calculated rebarbarization of America (see Damon Linker, below).

Self-parody in Christian Nationalist America

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the establishment of an Office of Religious Affairs to prioritize and improve “religious support” for the troops. The new office holds promise, but unfortunately it came wrapped in Hegseth’s typical Christian nationalist packaging. Can the Pentagon use the good idea while discarding its trappings?

The announcement was part of Hegseth’s “State of the Force” speech, which made headlines for other reasons. Hegseth promised to continue culling general officers, attacked the press as “anti-American losers,” and touted his elimination of diversity programs. He vowed that in his military, there would be “no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.”

That this sort of bombast has become par for the course in the Trump era is a large reason I simply stopped listening to official speeches and press conferences years ago. And I confess to having a specific allergy to Hegseth’s trademark delivery, every sentence delivered with maximal manly confidence and urgency. It’s easy to hear him saying something like: From now on every soldier will tie his shoelaces correctly in the United States military. We can no longer afford floppy laces that distract from maximum boot lethality.

…

None of this is unusual for Hegseth. A year ago, he released a short reel in which he prayed the Lord’s Prayer over a rapid-fire montage of American military heroism. He is quite comfortable merging the symbols and rhetoric of Christianity with the symbols and rhetoric of America. For him, the two naturally go together. That’s a pretty good shorthand definition of Christian nationalism.

Paul D. Miller, Blessed Is the Policymaker Who Quotes the Bible in Context

Rebarbarizing America

⁠⁠In a word, the United States is undergoing a process of rebarbarization—and the president, his team, and his party are actively encouraging it. Calling it a strategy to enhance thumos gives this process the appearance of something high-minded, but it isn’t. At bottom, it’s an effort to encourage Americans to think and act like brutes.⁠⁠

…

I honestly don’t have much more to say on this topic, but I thought returning to the theme of the previous post with additional examples would be a worthwhile exercise. Marco Rubio can advocate for more thumos all he wants. But the reality is that thumos usually takes care of itself. It emerges by nature from the depths of the human soul. That’s why the greatest political philosophers have treated thumos more as a problem that requires a response than as a virtue that needs to be cultivated.⁠⁠

…

⁠⁠I have a hard time imagining how anyone could have looked at America in the mid-2010s and decided that what the country really needed was a fresh injection of barbarism. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve failed to think my way fully into the MAGA mind.⁠⁠

Damon Linker, American Barbarism

You heard it here first

The Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News violated antitrust laws by suspending pool coverage of President Donald Trump. The networks collectively suspended pool video coverage of Trump for four days after the president banned journalists from CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds over what he called “fake news.” The pool has since gone dark again on days the White House has kept CNN out of the rotation. “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington said in a statement, referring to a law prohibiting anticompetitive business agreements. DOJ investigators on Friday demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool’s coverage of Trump and his decision to ban CNN from the White House.

The Morning Dispatch for October 12, but you heard it here first, on September 30.

The real mission of our universities

Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.

The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research.

Antón Barba-Kay, Havens for the Human.

I think they call that a “revealed preference.” And it’s a big part of why I prefer liberal arts colleges to universities for the promotion of full human thriving.

Winning every vertical with the content engines seized after launching a hostile

Maybe David Ellison is the unspoken telos of the university.

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

…

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

Ted Gioia, Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

Why we can’t have nice things

Building codes and zoning regulations have made it difficult, often illegal, to build houses that are worth caring about. Where I live, the building codes prohibit new houses in the old residential neighborhoods from exceeding thirty feet in height. Under that rule, my own 100-year-old house could not be legally built today. In effect, it is a law against houses more than two stories high. There are a great many fine examples of “Victorian” houses in Saratoga. These are the houses that wear the little brass plaques from the town historical society. These are the houses that tourists still come to see and enjoy, the houses that the community treasures, that give the town its character, its charm, that make the place worth caring about. None of them could be built legally under the present codes.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Shorts

  • [L]ocalism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (Roof Nails & Toothpicks)
  • Ken Paxton, the über-corrupt Texas attorney general in a tight race for the Senate, has launched statewide investigations into pediatricians who vaccinate children. (TMD)
  • If the liberal democratic nation state is government by consent, the artificial state is government by machine. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)
  • Liberal democratic states make citizens; the artificial state makes trolls. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Barbarism proudly paraded

A Barbaric Spectacle, Courtesy Of Hegseth

War Secretary Pete Hegseth says they’re going to livestream the December 3 execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist who murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood for Allah. This is wrong. I am at peace with Hasan getting what he deserves for his crimes, but it is barbaric to turn it into a spectacle. It is disgraceful. Hegseth keeps trying to be manly, but this comes off as merely macho.

You know Hasan is in a wheelchair, right? Is it really good for us to take pleasure in watching a man in a wheelchair, even a vile criminal like Hasan, shot to death? Really?

Remember the story from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” about his Christian friend Alypius? He had accepted an invitation to go to the gladiatorial games, but vowed to himself to shield his eyes when one man slaughtered another. Yet moved by the roar of the bloodthirsty crowd, Alypius uncovered his eyes and looked. He was possessed by a spirit of bloodlust after that, and took years to overcome it.

If justice, and maintaining law and order, requires the execution of Hasan, then let it be done dutifully, without passion. We should not grow fond of seeing men executed, even if they deserve it. In ages past — and not too long ago either — excited crowds would gather to watch men hanged, or in France, guillotined. Did this do their souls, or their moral senses, any good?

In the Orthodox Church, there is a tradition that requires soldiers returning from combat to go to confession, even if their war was just. The idea is that taking the life of another man, even if morally necessary, still stains one’s soul. It is a good tradition, a humane one. I see in that AP story I linked in the first paragraph that an academic who opposes the death penalty thinks that people seeing Hasan shot to death will have their consciences shocked into rejecting capital punishment. I doubt that very much. I would bet rather that it will increase their bloodlust.

Putting executions of prisoners on video and streaming them over the Internet is what Muslim terrorists do. We are not them. We must not become them.

Rod Dreher, who then turns to the grifting and whorishness of our Ambassador to Greece.

Maybe one day, under the accumulation of crap like Hegseth’s stunt and Kimberly Guilfoyle financial corruption, Rod will figure out that the Republicans are no less an existential threat than the Democrats:

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

This truth is not uniquely Christian: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6). “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Whether you embrace that company in your house or on social media, it corrupts. There are sins that “lead people into more and more ungodliness” as “their talk [spreads] like gangrene” (2 Timothy 2:16–17).

There is a character connection between rulers and subjects. When the Bible describes a king by saying, “He sinned and made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 14:16), it does not mean he twisted their arm. It means his influence shaped the people. That’s the calling of a leader. Take the lead in giving shape to the character of your people. So it happens. For good or for ill.

John Piper (expanding on a quote from my last post).

Marco Rubio … took a real swing at defining a new political philosophy for the American right. And it was, well, weird. On the plus side, it was great to hear a Western politician speak of the unique glories of our inheritance, and stare down the relativists and globalists. But to single out thymos — “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” — as the core Greek virtue, and therefore ours, is more than odd.

For the ancients, thymos always had to cede to reason to be exercised properly, and always, as for every virtue, in moderation. The consequences of unrestrained thymos could be disastrous, as Socrates taught, and Alcibiades, who rashly got Athens into a war it could not win, proved. So no, the West is not defined by ambition, nor by “the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” For most of the last two thousand years, after all, “national power” did not exist. Christendom did. The West is defined by reason allied with Christianity, which eventually gave us the liberal order. Rubio wants to replace that with unconstrained passion allied with the will to power. God help us.

But that just reveals how virulently anti-Christian the American right has now become. Fame and glory are the great goods, achieved by a constant, manly struggle to be the best: more Sparta than Athens, let alone Jesus. Rubio seemed to say that power is valuable for its own sake; and that “fighting for dominance” is the purpose of the state. You will not find one word in Rubio’s speech about the benefits of peace, or freedom, or Christian virtue. This is nihilist and it is pagan: an attempt to plunder, misread, and cherry-pick Greek thought to defend Trump’s sociopathy.

And so it’s fitting in this context, is it not, that the barbarians claiming to be conservatives who run this country are now planning to hold a live-streamed public execution of a paraplegic old man by firing squad — a practice the church itself regards as a grotesque betrayal of human dignity. Killing a disabled Muslim is, in fact, a great illustration of the core principle of the Trump era. Not the mere assertion of power: the convicted prisoner is utterly under state control and will face death anyway. But the brandishing of power for its own sake, the enforcement of not just punishment but humiliation, a public celebration of cruelty and revenge. With a tinge of religious bigotry thrown in.

Andrew Sullivan. Damon Linker, below, also comments on Rubio’s misbegotten speech.

Trump and Hegseth want you to watch [the execution of Nidal Hasan] because they think you’ll enjoy it. They want you to enjoy it. And more importantly, they want you to feel comfortable enjoying it.

I joked with colleagues this morning that my daily challenge with this newsletter is having to find newish ways to make the point that postliberalism is all about normalizing ruthlessness. Whenever the president and his fans bump up against some law or norm that’s keeping them from sating their tribal appetites, inevitably their impulse is to sweep it aside and indulge. It’s the ur-narrative of this entire era.

Trumpism is more an alternate morality than it is a political program, as regular readers have seen me say a good two dozen times. Has there ever been a clearer example than Hegseth wanting to stream an enemy’s death live on the internet?

Nick Catoggio. I suffer from excessive fear of mission out (a/k/a FOMO), but from this I will avert my eyes for sure.

Trusting media

There are respected pollster types who assess public trust in mainstream media. They have measured some unexpected friends, such as Democrat, trust of media trending downward, while Republican trust of media trends upward. Nick Catoggio speculates about the reasons:

The tricky part in trying to interpret data like this when you’re a news junkie is to avoid imputing your own freakishly high degree of media literacy to the general population.⁠⁠

…

⁠⁠Maybe populist right-wing media has grown so grotesque and self-parodying that it’s begun to inspire Strange New Respect for outlets like the New York Times in some conservatives.⁠⁠

…

[T]he hard truth is that ⁠⁠what used to be known as “conservative media” now consists almost exclusively of brain-dead Trumpist house organs on the one hand and unspeakably repellent postliberal goblins on the other. Your choice as a right-wing media consumer in 2026 is between Fox News propagandizing on behalf of the president and podcasters propagandizing on behalf of Hitler.⁠⁠

I find this plausible because I, a conservative, cannot bear most “conservative” media these days. Even the Free Press was on the chopping block because, in an apparent effort to be all things from center-left to fairly far-right, they’re publishing a lot of crap; but then the introduced Ross Douthat as a weekly columnist.

Bad precedent

I had a conversation with one of the fired generals not long ago, and this person pointed out that, in essence, they were fired for following orders. In other words, the Biden administration handed down some edicts and some orders regarding D.E.I. — diversity, equity, inclusion and other things — and as loyal soldiers, whether they agreed or not, they saluted and they carried out those orders. And Hegseth comes in and essentially says: Well, if you were carrying out the orders that were the priority of the previous administration, you’re woke, you’re weak, whatever, and you’re gone.

And one of the fears that was expressed to me by this former general was that, well, does that then set a precedent that if you are a general officer and you follow the orders of an administration, that the next administration will come in and purge you, replace you with general officers who have to then follow their orders, who will then only be purged by the next administration?

It strikes me that the Trump administration is setting a precedent here that if actually carried out by other presidents would be catastrophic for the integrity of the military. And it’s setting a precedent that, given enough time under the current administration, could be catastrophic for the idea that merit matters as much as political fidelity. But it was very chilling to me to hear the general essentially say, “I was fired for following a lawful order.”

David French

Civitas profunda

There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.

Cullen Murphy, The Fall of Rome All Over Again?

Marco Rubio on thumos

You gotta hand it to Marco Rubio: Not only did he deliver a powerful speech in defense of Western civilization on Wednesday afternoon (which also just so happened to be the third anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023). He also did it in Athens, Greece with a sunset-drenched Acropolis glowing behind him. As props go, that’s about as good as it gets …

…

[T]here is something else in the speech that’s perhaps even more worthy of criticism. Or rather, not something in the speech so much as something surrounding the speech—and that is the commander in chief Rubio serves. There is something faintly absurd, even insulting, about listening to a man praise excellence and the greatest achievements of Western civilization while representing an administration led by a president who exemplifies tackiness, cruelty, ignorance, corruption, and incompetence. My thumos—my love of my own country and culture—inspires me to respond to this man with disgust and contempt. I find him utterly loathsome and consider it indisputable that he has had an atrocious influence on American public life, pulling it continuously down to his own low level that always, somehow, manages to sink ever lower.

In this respect, Rubio’s speech is very much exemplary of our cultural moment in the sense that it feels like a virtual reality facsimile of the world we all live in—one that’s been tidied up and transformed by technological gimmicks into an airbrushed version of the real thing, a world in which (in Mark Lilla’s words) this country chose, for the second time in a decade, “a dim Caesar to sit at the pinnacle of institutional power.”

Who does Rubio think he’s fooling? Achilles, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch—his speech is filled with references to people, places, and events that were all touched by a greatness he wants us to reach for again. Sounds good! If Rubio himself were president, or any number of other Republicans prior to the past several years, then maybe this could be a serious conversation, a serious proposal for national, cultural, and civilizational renewal, with rhetoric and policies to match and reinforce it.

But under this president? Who starts a war without reasons and declares victory dozens of times while the fighting goes on—and who repeatedly issues threats to annihilate whole civilizations if he doesn’t get his way? Who stands before the United Nations and declares he took Venezuela’s oil because he could (because might makes right)? Who regularly calls the country’s other party the Dumbocrats? Who starts trade wars with allies and rivals on the basis of whims and personal pique? Who profits from his own policies by buying and selling investments before public announcements are made? Who seeks to rule by decree because he can’t be bothered to make use of a legislature his own party controls? Who deports immigrants to tinpot dictatorships where they have no ties of family or language?

I could go on for thousands of additional words listing Trump’s offenses against reason and virtue and good governance and basic human decency. But what would be the point? We all know the litany. We see it in the news every single degrading, obscene day. The United States during the second Trump administration is many things, but a champion or exemplification of excellence it most emphatically is not. It certainly has plenty of thumos, or at least well-acted public displays of thumos among members of the president’s paid and amateur cheerleading section in public office, the media, and online. But this is the kind of thumos that troubled Plato’s Socrates—the kind that’s deaf to reason, and that attaches itself to demagogues and false saviors cloaking their petty self-interested ambitions in lofty appeals to honor and glory.

I’m not convinced Rubio has identified a major malady that requires the country’s leading diplomat to propose a diagnosis and a cure. But I am convinced that if the illness is a real one, a representative of the second Trump administration may well be the least fit person on the planet to lead the charge to combat it.

Damon Linker

Shorts

  • ⁠⁠A postliberal political party will always campaign as the lesser of two evils because it is evil, and unapologetically so.⁠⁠ (Nick Catoggio)
  • ⁠⁠“Can you feel the thymos?” – Damon Linker on Hegseth announcing the public execution of Nidal Hasan.⁠⁠ (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “Rightists will scream ‘Colorblind meritocracy!’ right up until the point where Indian people start doing well, at which point every rightist turns into Ibram Kendi,” – Noah Smith. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The Noise Everywhere: Fauci, Punditry, and the Collapse of Public Authority

We’re on our own

The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Peggy Noonan

Dr. Fauci takes the fifth

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

…

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” …

Nick Catoggio

Explaining noise

As I am writing these lines I see the following headlines on my Bloomberg: →Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates. →Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus. and so on for an entire page. If I translate it well, the journalist claims to provide an explanation for something that amounts to perfect noise. A move of 1.03 with the Dow at 11,000 constitutes less than a 0.01% move. Such a move does not warrant an explanation. There is nothing there that an honest person can try to explain; there are no reasons to adduce. But like apprentice professors of comparative literature, journalists being paid to provide explanations will gladly and readily provide them. The only solution is for Michael Bloomberg to stop paying his journalists for providing commentary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

This doesn’t seem unrelated to the two Covid-related items, above. The public wants explanations and reassurances. There’s some cynical benefit in giving the public what it wants as Fauci did and the financial press continues to do.

AI pundits?

And then, finally, there’s AI. My contempt for generative AI could not be more thorough. I’ve tried to withhold judgment about it while I wait to see what becomes of it. But I’ve now seen enough to conclude it really will strip away an essential element of our humanity if we let it. Writing is a quintessentially human activity; it’s how we communicate our thoughts with one another. It’s an art that takes considerable skill to do well. Why would we seek to relieve ourselves of it? Writing isn’t a burden, any more than thinking is. Yes, it can be hard, but most worthwhile endeavors are. Accomplishing it despite that challenge is part of the reward of undertaking it in the first place.

Yet at a formal level, writing an op-ed isn’t that difficult. Your thesis statement (or “nutgraf,” as editors call it) goes near the top, preceded by an introduction that frames it artfully. Then come the arguments and supporting evidence, plus some examination of contrary arguments (“to be sure” paragraphs), followed by a concession or two and lots of pushback designed to knock down the strawmen. And that’s assuming the writer even aims to do that thing I noted above, where he or she makes an effort to persuade. If the goal, instead, is to foster communal feeling, then there’s no need to look at or even acknowledge counterarguments. Just wield the sledgehammer point by obvious point, followed by a conclusion that says, in effect, as I told you at the start, I am right and everyone who disagrees is either operating in bad faith or a retard. (Have you noticed how many people online—usually on the right, but not always—use the epithet retard in their social-media posts now?)

Why can’t an LLM do that? Believe me, it can. If not flawlessly already, it will be up to the task very soon, I can assure you.

Damon Linker

I don’t want to think that AI punditry is what’s in store for us, but as Linker notes, the New York Times has made little effort to replace departing luminaries on the Opinions page.

Some smear

Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for Wisconsin governor, is smearing his opponent Francesca Hong, the progressive Democrat. Smears such as pointing out that she said she wants to abolish the Senate. Francesca’s team hit back hard: “Tom Tiffany is once again telling lies and inventing quotes, because he can’t run on his record. Rep. Hong has never called for abolishing the U.S. Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn’t exist.”

Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. This post is still up, so, I think it’s safe to say it exists? That she pretty clearly made the statement?

Some Wisconsin fact-checkers are choosing to “pass” on it, though, with one writing in an email to Tiffany: “As always, thanks for the suggestion, but I think we’re going to pass on this one since it’s one tweet and this doesn’t seem to be her position.” Ohh, got it, so her position is just whatever she says, but the things she says aren’t relevant. Makes sense.

Nellie Bowles

Indiana’s Chud Lieutenant Governor stirs the pot

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — A late-night post on X by Indiana Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith took aim at the state’s public universities, specifically calling out Purdue after he read a message from a parent of a prospective Boilermaker.

In a post Wednesday night, Beckwith said he received a message from a parent who recently toured the West Lafayette campus. In the message, the parent took issue with the university’s marketing of cultural clubs, which included the “LGBTQ club,” in an informational video produced by the university.

“Then on tour had to point out their diversity tree. Then one of the Muslim guides made sure to proudly mention that she was part of the MSA Muslim student org,” Beckwith’s post said, quoting the parent. “Had to explain to my kid that’s the org that caused all of the violence and hate on campuses everywhere. I hate colleges altogether I think.”

…

In his post, Beckwith asked, “Why are state schools in Indiana the worst?”

”Do yourself a favor, send your kids to Hillsdale College where woke indoctrination won’t happen,” Beckwith said.

Jillian Ellison, Journal & Courier

I didn’t even need added context to see that the “parent of a prospective Boilermaker” was insular and hysterical, and that the Lt. Governor’s response was among his more troglodyte utterances.

But the reporter did provide some added context:

The Diversity Tree, outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall along Oval Drive, celebrates the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council, according to the Purdue Arboretum website. The tree is frequently painted with the letters of those member organizations.

So the simple presence of the word “diversity” was enough to set off insular parent and Lt. Governor even though the substance was “lots of fraternities and sororities.”

That leaves two objections intact:

  1. Purdue doesn’t cover up the existence of an LGBTQ Club among its cultural clubs.
  2. Purdue allowed a Muslim to conduct a prospective student and parent around campus and did not forbid her to mention her religion and the existence of a Muslim Student Association on campus, even though some insular and hysterical folks idiots freak out at the mere mention of Islam.

There’s good news and bad news in the background to this story. The good news is that Governor Mike Braun backed another hopeful as his running-mate and reportedly is uneasy with Beckwith, whose public profile and exceedingly thin political resumé (from two years on a local library board to Lieutenant Governor) make him a total loose cannon. The bad news is that the GOP in solemn convention thrust this unqualified pentecostal preacher onto the slate anyway. I think his lack of qualification was a feature, not a bug.

I do hope that Hoosier Republicans are appropriately appalled at Beckwith’s poor choice of targets (Purdue is hardly woke; it’s a Land Grant college, strong on agriculture, engineering, veterinary medicine and such, with a culture about like what you’d expect from future farmers, engineers and animal docs) and at his appalling recommendation of a private college in Michigan over an Indiana public university.

Shorts

  • [T]he difference between Americans and Europeans: Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance. (Paul Kingsnorth, Zen and the Art of Bear Spotting)
  • It seems anyone who takes up the Cross, or even seeks to do so, hears pretty soon about “works righteousness.” (My cyberfriend John Brady on micro.blog)
  • “Fidel Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The leaders of communist regimes are always rich. They steal and rob from those they govern,” – Ted Cruz. And Trump? (Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Pentecost

Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.

Taking God more seriously than Caesar

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

A Virtuous Circle

Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, commenting on this video.

Lumped together

In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Start with a bad premise, end with confusion

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.

Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.

Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

Aaron Renn, Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (emphasis in original)

God and Man at Anthropic

What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.

But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

…

The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.

Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.

It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.

…

When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.

…

If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.

And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.

Avital Balwit, Searching for God in Silicon Valley.

Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.

Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Never say Never

I never imagined that I would recommend listening to an accordion player. But the YouTube channel Sergei Teleshev Accordion is astonishing. I’ve never (that I can recall) seen accordions like that (they’re called button accordions, I guess) or heard them making serious, even thrilling, music, like this father and daughter do. (The daughter is 16, by the way.)

Trigger warning: The remainder of this post is (more or less) political

The Calvinball Presidency

I like arguments about ideas. The only way to have a good argument about ideas is if the person or people you’re arguing with have some degree of sincerity about what they are arguing for—or against. Being a political commentator in the Trump era is like being a sportscaster covering a game of Calvinball. The rules change all the time, so arguing about them is an exhausting waste of time.

Jonah Goldberg, The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era – The Dispatch

Inspectors General

When hoodlums start disabling security cameras, you can bet they’ve got nothing good in mind.

The Trump administration on Wednesday withdrew funding for the Council of Inspectors General, a federal watchdog group, and the entity’s website was disabled. The group oversaw a network of 72 inspectors general. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had decided last week to pull the group’s funding.

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

[W]e are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

As if on cue, some folks known to the algorithm as conservative and interested in military matters let it be known that they thought Hegseth’s show was just fine:

Much depends on the details and execution, but if implemented with both verve and prudence, Hegseth’s commonsense reforms will profit the American profession of arms.

As noted in my standard footer for blog posts, I am a participant on something called micro.blog: I follow people I’ve found interesting and some of them follow me. Yet I sensed it wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter/X. It was pleasant. It was sane.

I think Noonan has put her finger on why it is so: it has no algorithms.

In fact, I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

Speaking of The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth, Kevin D. Williamson has a few choice words:

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern. 

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

…

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund. 

Mau-mauing the NFL

I’d bet a modest amount that our Censor-in-Chief will figure out some threat to the NFL sufficient to motivate a change of the Superbowl Halftime Show from Bad Bunny to someone markedly more WASPish.

In any event, I’ll miss the game and the show. I’m expecting an emergency call then.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Saturday. 3/29/25

Our third-leading export

Much of what Illich had to say to those bright-eyed students preparing to spend their summer volunteering in Mexico are summed up in these early lines:

“I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life,’ since that is really the only life you know.”

Illich recognized that “development” work, as it was happening in the 1960s, was, in fact, a vehicle by which a whole complex nexus of values and systems was being exported to and imposed upon the “under-developed” world, and ultimately in such a way that the recipients of this aid would be subjected to new forms of poverty and dependence—“modernized poverty,” as Illich called it elsewhere.

…

Illich tells his audience that “next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders”—to which list, of course, we can add the tech evangelist. It is then that he drops this devastating line:

Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.

L. M. Sacasas, To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition

On “going home again”

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ And he went on to speak of the advantages, for a young writer, of living in New York among the writers and the editors and the publishers.

The conversation that followed was a persistence of politeness in the face of impossibility. I knew as well as Wolfe that there is a certain metaphorical sense in which you can’t go home again – that is, the past is lost to the extent that it cannot be lived in again. I knew perfectly well that I could not return home and be a child, or recover the secure pleasures of childhood.

But I knew also that as the sentence was spoken to me it bore a self-dramatizing sentimentality that was absurd. Home – the place, the countryside – was still there, still pretty much as I left it, and there was no reason I could not go back to it if I wanted to.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

More from the same source:

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

Extremisms

Knee-jerk whataboutism—citing left-wing extremism to brush away concerns of right-wing extremism—is a way of saying, effectively, “I don’t actually care about right-wing extremism. Left-wing extremism is so overwhelmingly bad it’s okay to turn a blind eye to the conspiracy theorists, thugs, and terrorists on my side.”

Paul D. Miller, The Deer, the Lion, the Beast, and the Serpent

Capital rights, human rights

Slavery was never less than a statement about the sovereignty of capital, and its rights, in relation to human rights. In the South, economic restrictions on religious organization by black Christians was part and parcel of the racial system undergirding slavery and the marginalization of free African Americans.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Terribly prophetic

When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.

Daniel Goldhaber, “the Cassandra of the Internet Age.”

The big tech platform debates about online censorship and content moderation? Those are ultimately debates about amplification and attention. Same with the crisis of disinformation. It’s impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the far right or, really, modern American politics without understanding attention hijacking and how it is used to wield power … the attempted Capitol insurrection in January [2021] was the result of thousands of influencers and news outlets that, in an attempt to gain fortune and fame and attention, trotted out increasingly dangerous conspiracy theories on platforms optimized to amplify outrage.

Charlie Warzel

Laying waste to cynicism

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Nick Cave via Annie Mueller via Dense Discovery 331

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Tuesday, 1/21/25

Does 47 have what greatness takes?

[T]he heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.

Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.

But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.

The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. …

Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. … Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. …

Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. …

Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.

…

Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.

The great presidents … understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”

Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.

Jack Goldsmith (unlocked article)

Offshore politics

Velocior, superior, stupidior

What runners they were,
round and round the arena
in their expensive armour

like that other runner
from Marathon, his time
unsurpassed until the arrival
of steroids. We cover the ground
faster, but what news do we bring?

Excerpt from Postcard, in R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

The neutering welcome

Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted.

Tom Holland, Dominion

If this makes no sense to you, read it again. And again. If it still makes no sense, you need to read some history, and Dominion wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

What is truly “self-evident”?

So yes, the equality of all humans seemed staringly obvious (at least in theory) to Franklin and Jefferson. But that was because their culture was saturated with Christian assumptions―so much so that the concepts and phrases they used were taken from Locke, who had got them from Hooker, who had got them from Scripture.”

Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that JudeoChristian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World

See my remark in the prior item.

Oblivious

On this bitter-cold January morning in the American midwest, my thoughts turned to hot, hearty soup, and this quickly led to a reflection.

There is a catering service in my fair city that used to be open to the public for sit-down lunch. Its kitchen included a soup genius.

I’d go there on a wintery day, and once I learned of it, I would invariably check their freezer before leaving, buying as many as four quarts of frozen, leftover soup.

Then one day the proprietress approached me: “Did you realize that a lot of people on fixed incomes come here to buy soup?” Crestfallen, I answered “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. Thank you for telling me. I’ll leave the soup for them.”

My obliviousness fit my recent description of non-rebellious sin.

God never said “Thou shalt not buy leftover soup.” He didn’t say “Thou shalt think twice or thrice about the indirect consequences of buying leftover soup.” And, since this was a rather upscale eatery (albeit in a downscale neighborhood), I’m not sure that the proverbial “moment’s reflection” would have revealed the indirect consequences to me; I just saw it as “I get good soup and this caterer gets more money.”

But I was, quite obliviously, snatching food from the mouths of poor pensioners. Greater awareness might have prevented that, and the proprietress’ consciousness-raising was welcome.

Proof

Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.

…

Hitchens’s Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Gurwinder Bhogal

Time to pull this out (again?)

I don’t recall if I’ve shared this favorite here:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Potpourri

Not (especially) political

Wisdom from the third world

We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy, there was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.

A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. I regret losing the URL, but offer the following in complement:

Serenity in leisure

There is a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from a recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course; and there is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, page 47.

What do you do for a living?

Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,” “park ranger,” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment, and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was, “What do you do for a living?”

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

… but liars can figure

I saw an item in the Wall Street Journal very recently:

Here’s a statistic to remember next year, as Congress debates extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts: The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden. Self-styled progressives will never admit it, but U.S. income taxes are already highly progressive ….

Then I saw a Politico item lamenting how little income tax the super-wealth pay on their increase wealth.

So, is someone lying?

Yeah, pretty much. Increased wealth doesn’t imply taxable income. I’m confident that the increased wealth figures Politico cited were mostly unrealized capital gains, which we don’t tax for a number of very good (if not ironclad) reasons.

Infrastructure century

Because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed full of cheap paneling and plastic furniture, why public schools look like overgrown gas stations, why courthouses, firehouses, halls of records, libraries, museums, post offices, and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses. The dogmas of Modernism only helped rationalize what the car economy demanded: bare bones buildings that served their basic functions without symbolically expressing any aspirations or civic virtues.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

How long will this hold?

Most Americans say media criticism helps hold politicians accountable | Pew Research Center

One of the things I worry about is unaccountable local officials now that the internet has killed smaller local media. The Lafayette Journal & Courier is a wraith, all but invisible were it not for stories fed from other Gannett papers. WLFI has been gutted with departures as its owner, Allen Media Group, bids billions for new acquisitions but doesn’t pay its bills. Only national politics is really covered any more, and that in only a selective way:

Trans teen health

In oral arguments at the Supreme Court Wednesday, ACLU lawyer and transgender ideologue Chase Strangio was forced to admit that gender realignment surgery for children does not prevent suicide—a core claim of many trans activists, notoriously communicated to parents by doctors as “do you want a live girl or a dead boy?” (Source: The Free Press)

What’s left of the trans argument against Tennessee law, in my view, boils down to “it’s sex discrimination to allow estrogen for girls, testosterone for boys, but not vice versa” — an argument that begs the question of whether the brute fact of sexual binary has any implications for law and medicine.

Wordplay

as man became disenchanted with regards to God and the cosmos, he became enchanted instead with himself and his own potential

Jake Meador

Just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.

Matthew Crawford

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis

[T]he forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

A Catholic expat friend of Rod Dreher

Two from Dreher’s latest book

Politics

Thankfulness

The Free Press has its people weigh in on what they’re thankful for at Thanksgiving. Martin Gurri responds:

This year, the petty little man in me is thankful that I won’t have to listen to Joe Biden’s double-dribbling sentences or Kamala Harris’s sitcom canned laughter ever again. The greedy analyst in me is thankful that Donald Trump is coming to burn Washington, D.C., to the ground, so Bari Weiss can keep telling people that I’m the only human on Earth who understands this dread pirate. The lonesome immigrant in me is thankful for my wife, and children, and grandchildren, my country and my street, my plans and my memories—because they make high politics feel like a trivial dream that I wake up from, when I step away from my laptop.

Pete Hegseth

I don’t trust Trump, and it seems to me as if he’s deliberately staffing up with sexual predators — as if that was proof of a decisive “get-things-done” manliness.

Moreover, I distrust pretty boys like Pete Heseth, Gavin Newsom, etc. (Yeah. Maybe there’s a little envy there.)

Nevertheless, I’m withholding my final judgment on Hegseth’s suitability for DoD because his accusers are hiding behind anonymity.

Pardon power

[T]he President is only accountable to the electorate so long as he or his party are up for election. Once the election is over, there’s no one for voters to punish. That’s why Biden waited until after the election to pardon Hunter; why Trump did the same for Steve Bannon and Roger Stone; why Obama did the same when commuting the sentences of Chelsea Manning and the terrorist Oscar López Rivera. And, most notoriously, that’s why Bill Clinton waited until his last full day in office to pardon the fugitive Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution and whose ex-wife donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

Stephen E. Sachs, How To Ban Lame-Duck Pardons

Feather pillows

It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters.

Kevin D. Williamson

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.