Category: Attitude

Our (mumble-mumble) anniversary

Ode to Miller Lite

Let’s start on two Lite notes.

First, it has been an impossibly long time since the missus and I tied the knot, and it shows no signs of slipping. Though I did discover this morning that poetry I consider brilliantly realistic about our human foibles can strike her as depressing.

Second:

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

Tyler Austin Harper, The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage. I just liked Harper’s deft touch. The negligible amount of beer I drink is invariably the kind that demands your attention.

Digital sackcloth and ashes

I well remember the magnificent tall ships sailing into New York Harbor for America’s bicentennial, which the wife and I watched on a little black & white TV in our apartment in Watonga, OK, with a four-month-old baby nearby.

For the 250th, we’re getting UFC on the White House lawn. I expect to avert my eyes, or blog about it again (based on news reports, not firsthand observation) — digital sackcloth and ashes.

I heard this week about a mature American couple that is expatriating without expectation of return — to the People’s Republic of China, which they have visited often. (Full disclosure: the wife is Chinese, and from a wealthy family, so there’s that.)

I daydream of expatriating (today’s post reflects the dream at several points), but for a number of reasons I know it won’t happen unless I literally must flee as a refugee. I’m having a very hard time internalizing the new American reality, so diminished from what appeared to be true for most of my life.

Would that The Donald had forced himself on us, as he has forced himself on women in the past. But no, 77 million of my countrymen voted for him. By the rules of the game, he owns us fair and square.

Still timely

From the time before Il Duce returned to the Oval Office:

I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.

Garrison Keillor, Sitting Scared in Church, Thinking About Evil

You could see it coming from 15 months away

No politician in the primary era has been as aggressive as Trump has in boosting electoral challenges to members of his party who buck him. Until 2016, it would have been regarded as somewhere between a faux pas and downright reckless for a sitting president to weaken a congressional incumbent by calling for his or her ouster in a primary. Trump does it regularly now, sometimes out of petty revenge.

That’s why Bill Cassidy went wobbly on Gabbard, Kennedy, and (soon) Patel, of course. He’s up for reelection next year, has drawn a serious primary challenger, and has two strikes against him already by dint of having voted to convict Trump in 2021. Had he opposed one of the president’s Cabinet nominees, any slim chance of him receiving Trump’s endorsement—and salvaging his career—would have evaporated. Cassidy will spend the rest of his life receiving sporadic death threats from populist Republicans either as a sitting senator or as a private citizen; when you frame the choice before him on Trump’s nominees that way, is it any is it any wonder that he chose the way he did?

Nick Catoggio, The Culture of Fear, February, 2025.

So now Cassidy, defeated in his primary by Trump’s toady, gets to endure death threats as a private citizen, because MAGA doesn’t forget.

I’m troubled at the outbursts of violence from the left toward Trump and the Right, but (perhaps it’s the way news gets covered) I fear more the menace of MAGA, from whose hands guns, and from whose lips death threats, are never far.

Speaking of retribution

So Trump has knocked off two, and in a few days probably will have bagged a third, Republican Senators in retributive primary challenges.

So now that they’re lame ducks, just how compliant will they be with his will? This much, I hope.

[N.B.: Trump did indeed bag his third. May they team up and bedevil him through the rest of their terms.]

Farewell, Party; Hello Tribe

Something I hadn’t really noticed is the death of political parties.

Oh, we still have “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but those are names of opposing tribes now, not actual parties.

Principal proof: Any sleazy real estate developer from Queens can run for President as a Republican in primary elections, regardless of his past positions, his [how many?] cameos in porn flicks, his divorces, his misogyny. Heck, the Republicans didn’t even bother with a platform one quadrennium: Whatever The Donald wants today is what we want.

It hasn’t happened on the D side yet, unless you count Fetterman or Platner — neither one a clear R, but sure a poor fit as Deez.

Must we always overshoot?

A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even “just” nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the victorious democracies became involved in their program of “demilitarizing” the vanquished “militaristic” nations. In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they were forced to ask their “demilitarized” former foes to rearm, and become allies in a common defense against a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

And as long as we’re on Niebuhr:

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history.

Id.

Institutions versus platforms

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand. The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

David Brooks, America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

The French Table

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!

David McCullough, The Greater Journey, quoting James Fenimore Cooper.

Here’s Putin’s mindset: We’re the Third Rome

I debated whether this should be in Sunday’s faith-focused post, but I think it belongs here as a glimpse into how the Russian state got so thick with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch (leading to things like the Patriarch scandalously backing the war on Ukraine):

After the fall of Constantinople, an obscure monk named Filofey wrote a treatise arguing that the Greeks had been conquered because they were apostate. Three Romes now marked the history of Christendom, he claimed: the first had fallen away in 1054 [i.e., the Great Schism – Tipsy]; the second had done so in 1439 [i.e., the Council of Ferrara-Florence]; and the third, Moscow, would and could never fall until the end of time. This Third Rome doctrine, as it came to be known, was never officially endorsed. But it did illustrate the isolated mentality of Russia as she entered the sixteenth century.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

CCAI

Remember CCM? Well now we have CCAI, Contemporary Christian Artificial Intelligence, or as they seem to prefer, Gloo.

It’s “Values-Aligned AI for Faith & Ministry.”

Ummmm … Whatever.

Shorts

  • Evangelicals have not promoted a faith of word and sacrament, but one of word preached, word studied, and word shared. (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
  • Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right. (Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land)
  • The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
  • States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens)
  • J.D. Vance is more than content to be in harness, happier than a dung beetle at Trump’s all-you-can-eat raw-sewage buffet. (Kevin D. Williamson, who called Vance “coprophagic” in his preceding column. Is there a theme emerging?)
  • Trump is, indeed, dedicated to running the government like a business—la Cosa Nostra. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • I love my country, but I fit [in Europe]. In part it’s because I love history so much, and Europe has history like Idaho has potatoes. (Rod Dreher)
  • This takes us to what I think is the most important lesson my time in Europe taught me. It deepened my tragic sense of life, which is a deeply un-American thing, but an important thing to know. (Rod Dreher)
  • Mr. Paxton represents the serrated edge of the Texas GOP, for which “owning the libs” is the highest political value. (WSJ)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Who less than self their country loved

Congressmen and Senators reveal their real preference …

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country love
And mercy more than life!

Not one of the Republican Congressmen and Senators who sit mute before the most open and flagrant act of Presidential corruption in the nation’s history can claim to love country more than self. Cowardly throne-sniffers! Shameful!

… and a South Carolina state Senator reveals his

First, our system wasn’t designed only to divide power between the different branches of the federal government, but also between the federal government and the sovereign states. Trump should not dominate the federal government, and he should not dominate the state of South Carolina.

“The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.”

As for South Carolina, there is “another brilliant creation, and that is of federalism and the sovereignty of the states. I don’t want to be a participant in further eroding federalism and further diminishing the essential role of states.”

Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, on why he won’t vote for or lead his state in redisctricting out its sole safe Democrat Congressional District, via David French (gift link). I’m glad David highlighted this (there’s much more, too, and worth reading). It gives me a glimmer of hope for a return of political normalcy.

A new phase in MAGA loyalty to Il Duce

When NPR interviewed a group of voters recently and asked them to grade the president’s term so far, one awarded him an A++. Aren’t gas prices hurting you, though, NPR wondered? Absolutely, the voter said, but he’s figured out a way to cope.

“Me and my wife have been fasting,” he told the outlet, “and there’s a lot of benefits, including one of those benefits is saving money on groceries.”

That’s the Jonestown phase …

Nick Catoggio

Mark Edmundson’s father was a mensch

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

David Brooks, Something Is Going Right at Universities

Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.

When asked by Senate Democrats about “the outcome of the 2020 election,” some of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are turning to a potentially surprising source as inspiration for their answers: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recent nominees have cited Jackson’s statement that it “wasn’t proper for her to comment on political matters” when she was asked about the 2020 election results during her 2022 confirmation vetting to explain why they, too, are declining to address that election, according to Bloomberg Law. “I think the answer that Justice Jackson gave is the only legally and ethically correct one,” said Matthew Schwartz, whom Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

SCOTUS blog

(Cf. Matthew 22:15-22)

War without a human face

“We shall conquer,“ we were told, “because we are the strongest, because we are the richest. We shall conquer because we have the will to do so.“ As if bons d’armement in themselves could bring about victory. As if war were nothing other than a vast industrial undertaking, a mere matter of capital. Such a war – a war of equipment and weaponry, inhuman, materialistic – yes, we have no doubt lost such a war. We must have the courage to say so. What is more, France could never have won such a war. Otherwise, she would no longer have been France, preeminently humane. If she had won such a war – one without a human face, a war of equipment (the kind of war being presented to us) – she would have lost the most precious thing she possesses, the essential characteristic of her very being. She would have lost that which makes her France, that which differentiates her from every other country on earth.

Vladimir Lossky, Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940.

Does this tell you what you need to know?

Nancy French, David French’s wife, had a solid reputation as a political ghostwriter.

In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor. That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.

Nancy French, Ghosted

AI Poetry

Katha Pollitt writing for the Nation, May 12:

About a year ago, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem “in the style of Katha Pollitt.” The result was fairly ridiculous: more like a greeting-card jingle than a poem by anyone over the age of 10. Whew! I tested ChatGPT again just now. Apparently it has been taking poetry workshops. Singsong rhyme and meter are out; free verse and wistfulness are in. . . .

[The poem] has all the tics of contemporary mediocre poetry: the knowing nudge (“as meetings do”), the look out the window (“Outside, the city”), the careless mixed metaphors. . . . There is nothing fresh or original here, no wit or zing, no pressure on language or form or voice or thought. It’s full of decorative phrases like “the stubborn verb of living” that sound “poetic” but do no work. It’s boring and generic and there are probably dozens of magazines that would publish it. But do you know what bothered me the most? The thought that this is what ChatGPT “thinks” my poems are like: obedient, saddish, “feminist” but defeated (get that woman a dishwasher!). Please believe me, reader: That is not how I write.

Via the Wall Street Journal

Eighth Day Books’ Warren Farha

Someone strongly recommended a Rod Dreher Substack post and I ended up with a one-week free trial. What follows is a direct, verbatim copy of one item in his Thursday post. I can only offer my 100% endorsement, adding that Warren worried about succession at Eighth Day Books. I hope he got it sorted. There is a fine group of thoughtful and voracious Christian readers in Wichita, organized loosely around the Eighth Day Institute, several of whom would be plausible proprietors of maybe the greatest Christian bookstore in the World. (When I told my wife, who never met him, that he had died, my eyes and nose started running for some reason. And Rod’s not kidding about Warren’s second wife.)

Warren Farha, RIP

Woke up this morning to devastating news: the great Warren Farha has died of pancreatic cancer. Warren was the owner of Eighth Day Books, probably the greatest Christian bookstore in the English-speaking world. If you’ve been, you know I’m telling the truth. He was not only an unparalleled genius at curating books, he was also one of the most humble human beings in the world. Everybody who knew Warren loved him. Here’s a link to a 2015 NYT piece about this special man and his bookstore, which he founded with money paid out after he lost his wife to a drunk driver.

Warren leaves behind three kids, a widow (his wonderful second wife, Chris), countless friends and admirers, and a legacy that will never be matched. Of course I’ll pray for his soul, because that’s what we do, but I am confident that all of us have gained a great intercessor in heaven. I hope Eighth Day Books will survive. If there’s any doubt about that, I will do everything in my power to make it happen, and I know that I am not alone in that.

God, what a fine man Warren Farha was. The best of us.

Shorts

  • The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt. (Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco via David Brooks)
  • The West is an imperial culture. The idea of “world-domination” is the spiritual basis and goal of all its achievements. (Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism)
  • I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority. (The late Barney Frank)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

What if the Furies came for America?

In the political sphere

What if the Furies came for America?

What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?

If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.

W. Aaron Vandiver, Trump and the Furies of Empire (Front Porch Republic)

This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff (some of which you’ll be seeing in due course), but the quote above is could be an epigraph.

If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws. 77 million voted for him.

I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wan’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you.

There’s only one sour note I noticed in this piece: Vandiver tries to shame Christians out of supporting Trump, which is well and good, but he comes across as a guy who was raised in a mainline Church that taught “be nice” as the heart of the Gospel. So I take his Christian bona fides with a grain of salt. With his makeweight “Christian” argument gone, it’s still a very solid piece.

Sophomoric trickery

[Congressman Don] Bacon recalls that his great-great-great-grandfather John lived near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. John’s uncle helped maintain it while Jefferson was away being president. John moved to Illinois and in 1861 enlisted in the Union Army. So, in 2020 it seemed like familial piety for Bacon to be a one of two prime movers of legislation to remove from Army bases (Forts Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Hood, Benning and others) the names of Confederate soldiers who did their damnedest to dismember the nation.

The legislation, which included a stipulation that no base would ever again have a Confederate’s name, inspired a provision in the 2021 defense authorization bill that became law over President Donald Trump’s veto. In 2025, however, the second Trump administration, practicing what it evidently considers sophisticated trickery, restored the names. Sort of.

Fort Bragg, which briefly was Fort Liberty, is now renamed back to Fort Bragg. Not, however, for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, but for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who won a Silver Star in World War II. Fort Pickett, which briefly became Fort Barfoot, is again Fort Pickett. This time, however, the name (we are supposed to believe) honors not the Virginian who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, but Vernon W. Pickett, a lieutenant who in World War II won a Distinguished Service Cross.

This sophomoric trickery — the cleverness of the dim-witted — by the commander in chief is intended to mock the law. This is what now passes for fulfilling the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

George Will, Serious. Has a spine. No wonder he’s leaving Congress.

“Republicans” and “Democrats” today

We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that’s not what a political party actually was, or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles, and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties. And so, instead, again, it’s actually increased partisanship. But it’s vibes-based. It’s this sense that you belong to, like, you know, the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s tote bag, matcha latte group. Or you belong to the pickup truck, “Yellowstone”-watching, Walmart group. And it’s not policy based.

Sarah Isgur.

Speaking of political parties, I’m really, really missing the days when they assembled in smoke-filled rooms and came up with candidates who they thought could win elections to advance their ideas. Now we have primary elections wherein the President of the United States sends out his zombie voters to politically assassinate distinguished incumbents who did something that made him mad, as GOP Senators shrug and say, in effect, “Well, it’s his party; he can kick out whoever he wants to.”. The Republican party and incumbency mean nothing to Trump.

Trump took revenge on Senator Bill Cassidy over the weekend and will unseat Thomas Massie on Tuesday. May the instruments of his revenge go down in flames in November.

And may we once again discover the importance of functioning political parties.

Thucydides trap

[On Thursday,] Xi Jinping warned Donald Trump to his face about a “Thucydides trap” potentially unfolding between our two countries.

Like everyone else, my first thought when I heard the news was, “There’s no way Trump knows what a Thucydides trap is.”

A “Thucydides trap” refers to the rising probability of war when a long-dominant power is at risk of being usurped by a rising one. America is in decline and everyone knows it, Xi was implying, and the White House should take care not to let its anxiety about that lead it to foolishly assert itself in defense of Taiwan.

Someone must have explained that to the president following the summit. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump clarified afterward on Truth Social, not at all defensively.

That was cute spin, but it ain’t Joe Biden whom Chinese nationalists have been moved to publicly thank for destroying U.S. global supremacy. Trump’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” the New York Times reported earlier this week, summarizing the analysis of one Beijing think tank.

Nick Catoggio

Somehow, this resonates

“You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?” “Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.” “The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”

Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin

Outside the political sphere

Tech just blows my mind sometimes

China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin … The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.

John Ellis News Items.

Lingua franca

Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America.

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Where’s the poverty?

In America, the land of the free, you can earn a billion bucks and then live however you’d like so long as you wouldn’t like to live as humanely as a middle-class Parisian.

I’m not, alas, in Paris right now. But I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.”

Megan McArdle, Europe has the grandeur. But America has economic abundance.

See also Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture

Shorts

  • … Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns Pornhub. (The Morning Dispatch)
  • “Once somebody’s proven they’re too frightened of being called ‘bigot’ to defend the most vulnerable, they’ve shown who they are,” – JK Rowling via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” – Donald Trump, who “obliterated” the nuclear sites last year via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “[Biden] has one ability I don’t have: he sleeps. … He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. … You’ll never see me sleeping in front of a camera,” – Trump in 2024 via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “2019: Donald Trump calls on China to investigate Joe Biden for having son Hunter fly to China on Air Force Two as he sought business in China. 2026: Donald Trump flies son Eric to China on Air Force One as company linked to him explores a deal with a Chinese chipmaker,” – Matt Viser via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “One of the enduring Two Americas truisms of the decade: Repubs convinced Obama is behind every tree and Dems wishing he would show up in the forest at all,” – Jonathan Martin via Andrew Sullivan.
  • Pressure on journalists has risen exponentially since the turn of the century. Many media companies require their journalists to produce up to a dozen stories a day – all in pursuit of clicks and likes. Maintaining high standards is impossible. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
  • Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised. (Frank Bruni)
  • In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • Microsoft has rebranded its famed gaming division, Xbox. It will now be called XBOX. We salute the marketing team for their risk-taking, creativity, and awareness of the caps lock key. The Morning Dispatch
  • Epitaph for Modernity: I came, I shopped, I died. (Fr. Stephen Freeman).
  • You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. (Jeannette Rankin)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

In tempore belli

A vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite

In order to ameliorate the resulting clash of commitments to divergent, incompatible preferences and pursuits, political leaders and other elites rely heavily and increasingly on platitudinous rhetoric and consumerism, the latter involving citizens’ widespread conformity to a seemingly insatiable acquisitiveness regardless of their income level. Were the flow of prosperity’s spigot seriously to wane, however, citizens’ clashes would likely intensify, reversing the dominant trajectory through which Westerners have willingly permitted their self-colonization by capitalism since the seventeenth century. Hence the necessary ideological commitment of modern Western states to unending economic growth, which perpetuates “the notion of the state as a vast bureaucracy in the service of appetite, aimed above all at the promotion of economic life and comfort.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

SPLC

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
  6. Karma is real. OR “paybacks are hell” if you prefer.

I encourage you to contemn SPLC2026 and stop filling its ample coffers, but don’t expect that a criminal conviction is very likely.

Trolls and bootlickers — of the Left!

How quickly the winds have shifted! Yesterday’s elites promulgated ideas that I scorned, but it never occurred to me that the Successor Ideology was foreshadowing the populist trollery of today’s MAGA Right, albeit to opposite tribal effect. James Howard Kunstler distills some of it:

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

James Howard Kunstler, Round-up at the Wokester Corral.

(Pointless aside: I sing in a quite good choir and I use voice recognition a lot for writing in short bursts. Voice recognition has never gotten “chorale” right, always rendering it “corral,” regardless of context.)

Trump

I apologize for so much focus on Donald Trump. His unlawful and idiotic war against Iran (as I understand it, military war gamers always knew Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in a war with the U.S.) makes it urgent to push back.

We’ve probably already lost “America as we knew it,” but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get worse.

Time’s up on your stupid war, sir

For years, America’s cowardly political leadership class has pretended that the War Powers Act entitles the president to bomb whoever the hell he wants for 60 days without approval from Congress. Only after those 60 days have run does he have an obligation to seek authorization from the legislature.

Three seconds of thought about why the law was written will reveal why that’s stupid.

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973 to rein in Richard Nixon after he expanded the war in Vietnam by secretly bombing neighboring Cambodia. The point of the law, obviously, wasn’t to justify that bombing retroactively by granting Nixon a 60-day free pass. The point was to affirm that, with very limited exceptions, the president can’t engage in hostilities with a country unless Congress says so.

Nixon vetoed the bill when it reached his desk, but lawmakers felt so strongly about it that they overrode his veto by bipartisan supermajority margins. It was a bold play by the legislature to claw back its rightful war-making authority under Article I—not to create a massive two-month exception to it for the executive branch.

Nick Catoggio

World Historical

Publicly, Trump compares himself to Washington and Lincoln. Privately, it’s Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.

I always recognized the narcissism, but I pretty much missed the delusions of grandeur.

And they are “delusions,” considering the eulogistic connotations of “grandeur.”

But I think I’ve already acknowledged that Trump is an extremely consequential President, and “consequential” carries no eulogistic connotations. Under that rubric, he may indeed prove world historic. How could a chaos agent who has seized semi-dictatorial power over the world’s hegemon not have a shot at “world historic” if he’s willing to stoop low enough?

Conservatives versus power-seekers

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming. I don’t know that there’s a single real conservative in Trump’s administration. I once thought J.D. Vance was conservative, but Trump’s reverse Midas Touch hexed him.

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth didn’t appreciate one congressman’s questions about the Iran war last Wednesday, so he accused him of “false equivolation.” (My own ears from CBS news)
  • [I]n Washington this past week, Charles came into his own. Forty years after Diana’s Cinderella turn, Charles got to be Cinderfella … In a country rife with No Kings protests, this king was a tonic. He presented himself with elegance, intelligence and wit — everything that has been wanting in Washington during the Trump era. Maureen Dowd

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

I’m surprised by my reaction to the war on Iran.

  • We are at war.
  • Everything about our entry into this war was wrong.
  • Articles of Impeachment should have been passed by now, with the Senate gearing up for trial.
  • Much as I detest Trump, I cannot root for America to lose.
  • But I can root for Americans, hurt in the pocketbook by his tariffs and the disruption of world oil flow (his general barbarity having passed without objection), to get furious and crush his bootlickers this Fall.

Mind you, this is reaction, not analysis. I have no qualifications to analyze the conduct of the war.

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

In his final year of teaching in Baylor’s Honors College, Alan Jacobs appears to be at the top of his game. He in particular has made me aware that there are, in theory, ways for conscientious profs to liberate their students from the stultifying pressure to let AI write their essays for them.

Now in his first column for the Dispatch, he gets a bit more concrete. For instance:

When I have talked with my fellow professors in the Great Texts program at Baylor’s Honors College, I have learned a few things. Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like “What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?” This allows the professor to discover whether the student actually knows what he or she is talking about. In such situations, and in full oral exams, there are few ways to hide your ignorance. Professors who teach this way can largely (if not wholly) ignore the AI freakout.

…

Properly understood, the disruption of humanities teaching by AI is a gift, and I plan to receive it as such, rather than complain about a burden. As a teacher, I find these new conditions invigorating and refreshing. I feel like Charles Foster Kane when he started his career as a newspaper publisher: I don’t know how to teach masterpieces of literature and philosophy and theology, I just try everything I can think of. I find that my students—even if they’re not always as excited as I am—welcome these experiments and are quite willing to engage in them.

…

[F]or me, the rise of the chatbots has been an unexpected, late-career gift. It has made my teaching more fun for me, and I think more interesting for my students. And I believe the lessons I have learned can be generalized.

…

By depriving students of constant AI use—or, to put it more accurately, by allowing them some respite from the tyranny of the chatbots over their lives—we actually enable them to exercise their minds in unfamiliar, and for some unprecedented, ways. 

In short, there’s a great opportunity here for those who want to take it. Humanities professors of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our self-forged chains.

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

Also in Texas, the private start-up University of Austin suffered an exodus of academic talent after its principal funder, Joe Lonsdale, strong-armed the institution into embracing “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti]-identity politics, and anti-Islamism.”

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

This is a bitter, bitter disappointment for me, as I suspect it is for Pano Kanelos, who left the Presidency of the estimable St. John’s College – Annapolis to become the Founding President of University of Austin.

Is the idea of starting a new, excellent and free university Quixotic in the 21st century? Will moneyed barbarians always be in the saddle?

Tu quoque

Every one of these ideas is terrible — because every one of them follows from a fundamental failure to grasp the character of political reality in the United States. Hauling members of the opposing party before state tribunals for official condemnation, packing the country’s highest court with judges guaranteed to hand down decisions favorable to progressives, or otherwise altering the rules of American politics to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents — none of that would move the country toward anything resembling “reconciliation.” On the contrary, it would move the country several steps closer to being torn apart.

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

The same observations apply to MAGA smashing norms in 2025-26 “to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents.” The main difference is that MAGA is explicit about seeking to smash and humiliate, not reconcile.

Infantile rebellion

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity.

Carl Trueman, Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society – First Things

Wordplay

So many felicitous phrases to brighten my day (via Frank Bruni)!:

  • In The Guardian, Dave Schilling considered an icy spectacle that has received more attention than usual lately: “Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a ‘puck.’ It’s adorable. It’s like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for people missing teeth.”
  • In The Times, Wesley Morris argued that the real appeal of the hit television series “Heated Rivalry,” set in the world of professional hockey, isn’t the sex: “The talking is the strength of the show. On the one hand, big deal. Men have never been doing more talking. They’re talking so much that we now refer to that talking as the manosphere, meaning that the chat has achieved a degree of gaseousness that only earth science can name.”
  • W.J. Hennigan pondered the prickliness of a member of Trump’s cabinet: “For a guy who calls himself the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth sure is defensive.”
  • In a post on X, Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, made fun of many Republicans’ tortured efforts not to call the attack on Iran by a certain three-letter word: “It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.”
  • In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wondered about Trump’s focus and coherence amid his shifting explanations for military strikes against Iran: “The president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.”

Shorts

  • …sexless epileptics jerking and lurching across a dance floor, lewd yet without the touch of a human hand. (Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes, describing school dances of the period)
  • … “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. (Poems Ancient and Modern)
  • Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights (bold added).
  • I recently heard of some new protein-heavy martini, which a comedian said tastes like a podcast. (My social medium friend Jeremy Abel, a fellow Hoosier.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Impeach Trump

As I reviewed my latest draft weekday blog, I found it full of politics and war. So I decided to hold back everything else for another post and to put a trigger warning on this one: I give Donald J. Trump and his minions no quarter.

Missing a functioning democracy

[I]n those tense, polarized months of 2002 and 2003, we had hashed out the case for war thoroughly beforehand, as democracies do. A thousand op-eds bloomed; critical votes were taken in the Congress; political careers were weighed in the balance; and Colin Powell went to the UN to present the “evidence.”

Seems like a wholly different world, doesn’t it?

Come with me a little further back in time to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That was a war started by Saddam Hussein, not us. How did we go about a new war in the Middle East back then? Well, we had another big public debate, another trip to the UN, and then another vote in the Congress. It was closer than we remember: just 52-47 in the Senate (with one abstention). We then went to war with a very precise aim — ending the occupation of Kuwait — after amassing a coalition of 35 countries, and did so to cement the status of international law in the post-Cold War world.

Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?

And there’s a reason for that. We had a functioning liberal democracy then, a constitutional system that was imperfectly but actually followed, a responsible president, and international law on our side.

Today, we have precisely none of the above.

We’ve had no debate; we’ve had no search for international support or allies; we’ve ignored the UN entirely; the Congress didn’t debate, let alone vote, in advance; and the American people were told about the war after it had already begun. All of this renders this war illegal and unconstitutional and outrageous, and the fact that most people have just accepted it is proof, if we still needed it, that the extinction-level event I predicted in 2016 is now well in the rearview mirror.

In plain English, this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country. This war makes us a textbook case of how democracies stagger into tyranny and endless war.

Andrew Sullivan

Not reassuring

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy organization dedicated to assuring church-state separation in the armed forces, reported yesterday that it has received numerous complaints from military personnel that, in briefings, their commanders are describing the military operations against Iran in Christian eschatological terms. According to a report on Substack by journalist Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Religion Clause: Advocacy Group Says Military Commanders Are Describing Iran Operations in Christian Biblical Terms.

I thought dispensationalist bullcrap was dying, but I guess the self-styled Secretary of War didn’t get the message.

Politics as Ritual Humiliation

Republicans … continue to practice politics as a form of ritual humiliation for the remains of the old guard, compelling Sen. John Cornyn to stand as an equal to Ken Paxton, the morally depraved and intellectually vacant grotesque who currently serves as attorney general of Texas. Sen. Cornyn barely topped Paxton in the three-man primary and now must face him again in a runoff.

Some Democrats have in mind the success Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and his allies had—and continue to have—meddling in Republican primary elections to elevate extremists and kooks (more extreme and kookier than the Republican average, I mean) on the grounds that such nut-cutlets are easier to beat in general elections, and quietly are talking up the idea of working to help secure the GOP nomination for Paxton.

Kevin D. Williamson

The bellicose through-line from neocons to Trump

The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer and China analyst, it argued that the official populist repudiation of George W. Bush and neoconservatism masked a deep continuity between the Iraq-era conservative mainstream and the Trump-era new right.

…

The famous quote from a Bush official about how “when we act, we create our own reality” directly anticipated the Trump-era belief that “you can just do things.”

…

[T]he idea that America can go into a rough neighborhood, hit our enemies hard, kill some of their leaders and force them to RESPECT OUR HEGEMONY is not some brilliant innovation of the based Trump era. It was the dominant right-wing perspective on the Iraq war (and, indeed, sometimes a centrist perspective as well), especially in the run-up to the invasion, with democracy promotion very much a minor theme.

Ross Douthat

Barbarism nukes nihilism

In liberating Western Europe and Asia, the United States military for its part firebombed German cities into virtual nonexistence. Then, on the feast of Christ’s Holy Transfiguration (August 6) in 1945, it annihilated a hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at Hiroshima with the dropping of a single atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Defeating the most nihilistic powers to threaten Christendom since the Mongol invasions provoked, in turn, acts of barbarity.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

His own morality

When asked in January by the New York Times “if there were any limits on his global powers,” President Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I’m afraid those are the only constraints on Trump’s use of nuclear weapons in Iran.

Jack Goldsmith, Trump, Iran, Nuclear Weapons.

Would it be rude to say I’ve been unimpressed with Trump’s personal morality?

Funnies

The “targeted strike” in Iran

When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: 

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’” 

I suppose what’s happening now in Iran is merely a targeted strike, only we’re too sinful to see it.

(Alan Jacobs, political Mottramism)

Obituaries

Every day, a shabbily dressed man pauses at the same newsstand to scan the front pages. He then moves on without buying anything. At last the news seller confronts him.

“I know times are tough, but you must be able to afford at least one single newspaper.”

“I don’t need to buy the whole paper. I only care about the obituaries.”

“You do need to buy the paper, because the obituaries are in the back pages.”

“Not the one I’m looking for. That one will be right up front.”

David Frum

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth is “something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn. ‘We’re playing for keeps.’ ‘We’re punching them while they’re down.’ He brags about our ‘lethality.’ Stop talking like that! Don’t feed the stereotypes, don’t tempt the gods.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Trump’s Department of Justice tacitly admits that it is too corrupted to withstand ethical inquiry.
  • Cheering for epistemic humility gets you no television interviews, no requests for op-eds, and no invitations to conferences. … But in the early phase of a war, above all, it should be the prudent observer’s battle cry. (Eliot Abrams)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

This is the 50th anniversary of one of the times I quit smoking. The last time I quit was maybe 7 to 9 years later (of that time, I lost track) – long enough ago that, as I understand it, my history of smoking is no longer medically relevant. Some of my medical records even say, incorrigibly as history but perhaps accurately as a medical term of art, “never smoked.”

The cultural shift against smoking in my lifetime has been remarkable.

Punked

[Poet Rolfe] Humphries may be best known, these days for a literary joke. He had received an assignment from Poetry magazine for a “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” in which, the editors asked, there needed to be one classical reference per line. Humphries sent in the requested poem, which appeared in the June 1939 issue, and began: “Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again, / Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone.”

But the poet nursed a hated of Nicholas Murray Butler, the long-time president of Columbia University (who, it must be said, had no editorial role at the Chicago-based Poetry magazine), and so Humphries built the poem as an acrostic, the initial letters of each line spelling out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”

“Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person,” the magazine apologized later that summer, and I have to say that while I appreciate snide poetry, my sympathies are with the editors who got used in the incident.

Joseph Bottum, commenting on the poet and his poem A Song for Mardi Gras.

Perspective

When it’s the most powerful nation on earth conducting a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries (one of which had precisely nothing to do with the inciting incident), leaving upward of a million civilians dead, revenge becomes a temporarily useful virtue. When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.

Omar El Akkadm One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry 

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

Do you see the theme there?

… In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

I graduated from Chicago in 1983, and at about the same time a group of people graduated from Dartmouth. We all moved to Washington about the same time. I knew them, and some of them have become famous, like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I came out of Chicago earnestly reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and all that, and my friends and I became pro-conservative. But the Dartmouth Review folks were not pro-conservative, they were anti-left. So in retrospect, I can see how big and vast a difference there was between people that I thought were part of the same movement. The sad news is that they now dominate conservatism and the Republican Party. Whereas my friends became Never Trumpers.

David Brooks

Caricatures

I spent most of my adult life thinking ill of [Jesse] Jackson, probably because of his infamous “Hymietown” remark in the 1984 presidential race … Then, about seven years ago, I met him for breakfast in New York. The man I spent an hour with was gracious, reflective, engaged, knowledgeable and more than a touch sad, probably because he was aware of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It reminded me that people are never the caricature that others make of them, and that there can be a lot to like and learn from people with whom we often disagree.

Bret Stephens

Shorts

  • It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. (George Will of VP JD Vance)
  • After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet. (James Van Der Beek)
  • Attention without feeling is only a report. (Poet Mary Oliver)
  • I’m at peace, and I’m excited, but my Oura Ring will tell you I’m not sleeping well. (David Brooks on his departure from the New York Times to take an interesting new position at Yale.)
  • The problem is that he overreacts. It’s like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, “You know what will fix acne? Decapitation.” That’s Trump. What he’s doing with scientific research is horrific. (David Brooks again.)
  • The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. (Margaret Thatcher via Bret Stephens)
  • President Trump — who’d dip himself in gold if he were confident that it wouldn’t seal his mouth shut and prevent him from yammering. (Frank Bruni)
  • Someone who had been a Catholic longer than five minutes would perhaps grasp the irony of claiming a minority group had dual loyalty. (Sarah Stewart on the antisemitism of Carol Prejean Boller, washed-up beauty queen, “influencer,” and recent Catholic convert.)
  • My job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. (A headmaster at the Stowe School, quoted by David Brooks.)
  • Vigilence is metabolically expensive. (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

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.

Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

…

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real … Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places …

Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. … As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his own continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

David Brooks’ farewell column for the New York Times (gift link) reprises the concerns about which he has been writing of late, which writing made him my favorite at the Times. (See below for an example.) I hope he won’t just disappear into some Yale classroom, never again to share his wisdom with the wider world.

The idea that “the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money” has outraged me for as long as I can remember — perhaps because I succumbed to it for what seemed like an adequate personal reason (an engagement to be married in a year when I was 19), but then never got back formally to the humanities when that reason vanished. I’ve been an autodidact ever since, envious of those who studied the humanities more formally, in the give-and-take of a well-run classroom.

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

One journalist I knew (who worked for a far bigger outlet as a political correspondent) once told me that the news was the first thing she read when she opened her eyes, and the last thing she saw before falling asleep.

Perhaps this is how some journalists need to live their lives. If reporting the daily news is their calling, they must be deeply aware of what is going on. Even if it means watching and reading all the time.

But it is not for you and me, friends. This sort of news consumption will reign your emotions: it will drive you to anger, terror, annoyance, and despair. It will make you feel helpless. It will divorce you from the daily, real things happening in your own home. Take it from someone who’s lived it: knowing absolutely everything that is happening right now—whether in Iran, or Ukraine, or Washington, D.C., or Minnesota—is not your calling. It can actually serve as a dangerous distraction from the vocations of your own life, neighborhood, and community.

…

Here are some boundaries I’ve set in place for my news consumption since 2020. They have been very helpful. I pray they are helpful to you.

  • Check one site, and check it once every couple days at most. If you can, check it once a week. That’s it. Find a reliable source that you trust—preferably a site that tries not to follow a party line. It is more likely to give you the nuance partisan news outlets neglect. If the events of the hour are truly and lastingly important, they will still be talked about a week later. If a credible news outlet, one you find trustworthy and careful, isn’t talking about it, there’s a good chance you should not worry about it. This filters out a lot of momentary “noise,” and allows you to attend to what truly matters.

Gracy Olmstead.

Olmstead is the second person who tacitly or explicitly recommends what strikes me, at the gut level, as excessive disengagement: once-weekly news exposure. Alan Jacobs, who only reads the Economist, and that only when it arrives at his home, is the other.

I was raised in such a way that, by precept or example (I don’t remember the precept being vocalized), I absorbed the message that “good citizens stay on top of the news.” I don’t know that it was ever right. Maybe it was in the 1950s. But “the news” is far vaster today than it was then, and more polarized, and frequently (especially if you get social media news) insane.

All that aside, I sense that I’m spending too much time on the news because, well, I sit down for morning devotions and news around 5:30 am and often am still sitting there at 10 am. Like today, for instance, he typed at 10:00 am.

I’m retired, so it’s not like I’m robbing from my employer. God, maybe, but not, god forbid, my employer.

I’m aware of this. I think I’m making progress.

Re-orientation

Alan Jacobs sympathizes with people who are tempted to give up reading the news because it’s too depressing. But that:

is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave you fretful and at loose ends. 

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics. 

This practice offers a threefold reorientation: 

  • Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; 
  • Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); 
  • Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.”

The insatiable lust for domination, he continues “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant attaches himself only to those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”

…

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

David Brooks

History based on reality

I have suspected that part of the reason for a rightward swing in young people [blood-and-soil nationalism,, though] may be that the holocaust is not seared into their worldview and identity as it is in my generation. I was born after the war, but was acutely aware of its horrors. I specifically recall Life’s Picture History of World War II in my childhood home. A child who viewed that repeatedly, as I did, isn’t likely to forget.

When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

Aaron Renn, The Manosphere and the Church (September 2020)

Presumption of Regularity Redux

Early in Trump’s second administration, handwriting appeared on the walls of the Department of Justice and the offices Federal District Attorneys:

Integrity will not be tolerated if it requires candor to the court about weaknesses in the Administration’s position.

If you’ve ever been even a mediocre lawyer, you know that intransigence toward a judge who has figured out your case’s weakness is not wise even in the short term. In the longer term, it tells the court you can’t be trusted to be honest.

In Federal Courts, there was a longstanding “presumption of regularity” in the doings of government lawyers. That has been lost so completely that it’s no longer even talked about in the news, especially when there are new Administration theatrics to talk about.

But I’m going to talk about something related. Minneapolis is a “sanctuary city” of a fairly rigorous sort. It won’t cooperate with DHS/ICE even so modestly as to let them know when they have illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes in their custody. That’s part of Trump’s rationale, at least after-the-fact, for sending in 3000 ICE agents ostensibly to deal with welfare fraud that didn’t involve illegal immigrants but US Citizens who were once immigrants. So something smells fishy.

Those ICE agents are wearing masks. They’re behaving provocatively. The news has stories about them grabbing brown kids as they leave school, then returning them hours later because they’re here legally, and about American citizens of foreign origin being snatched and sent to hellhole foreign prisons.

The new guy in charge of ICE in Minneapolis says he’ll draw down his troops if Minneapolis will start cooperating on the transfer of immigrant prisoners to ICE control.

Can you, Minneapolis official, entertain any presumption of regularity on the part of ICE? Can you presume that American Citizens won’t be manhandled, tortured, deported by these masked goons?

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

The iPhone [note iPhone standing in for all smartphones, like Kleenex=facial tissue] seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.

So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”

…

We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed.

…

In a country with a fascistic government that disseminates massive lies — ours — iPhone videos become essential to keep democracy and objective truth on life support. There are dangers, of course. Lack of context can deceive; AI has made every video’s authenticity suspect; people can subjectively interpret things any way they want. But what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

Civic hygiene: another reason to hold onto my phone while many around me are (vocally) giving up theirs. I don’t struggle with compulsive smartphone use; if you do, your mileage may vary.

Really, the only qualms I have about my phone are about the Chinese factory workers who make them — and that’s always a tough call because some jobs just are hard or boring, and the line between that and metaphorical slavery is indistinct.

The death of the magazine

But a magazine I always thought of as a relatively small group of identifiable writers, connected with some broad themes. They could disagree with each other. They had some broad agreements, creating this little thing that would have a variety of their views.

The Atlantic is now just now a machine. I mean, it has hundreds of staffers. It has hundreds of writers. … The magazine itself, of course, was directly challenged by the internet in ways that probably impossible to recreate. The fact that you had to have these writers stapled together with paper really did create a particular cultural product that cannot be done anymore.

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

Throughout the extensive litigation over the [Alien Enemies Act], in this case and others, the Trump Administration has claimed the president deserves absolute deference when he claims that an “invasion” exists. The absurd implications of this position were highlighted in yesterday’s argument, when Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod (appointed by George W. Bush) asked whether the president could invoke the AEA in response to the “British Invasion” of rock stars, like the Beatles. “What if,” she asked “the [President’s] proclamation said ‘we’re having a British invasion.’ They’re sending all these musicians over to corrupt young minds…. They’re coming over and they’re taking over all kinds of establishments.” Could courts then rule the president’s invocation of the AEA was illegal? In response, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign admitted the government’s position would require courts to still defer to the president, and allow him to wield the extraordinary emergency powers that can only be triggered by an actual “invasion.”

Ilya Somin, Could the President Invoke the Alien Enemies Act in Response to the “British Invasion” of Rock Stars Like the Beatles?

Felicitous sentences

  • Rachel Louise Snyder appraised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Renee Good: “The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.” (Karla Holomon, Cary, N.C., and Molly Gaffga, Sanatoga, Pa., among many others)
  • Maureen Dowd parsed this cursed second term of Trump’s: “Trump Redux is infatuated with drone strikes and airstrikes, tumescent with the power of the world’s greatest military, hungry to devour the hemisphere in one imperialistic gulp.” (Ellen Casey, Hope, R.I., and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

  • I’ve always been kind of anti-populist because I know people. And the more people you know, the less of a populist you are, I think. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • From the perspective of political theory, my argument falls within the category of “political indifferentism”–that is, the notion that politics is mostly a matter “indifferent” to core human interests. (Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods)
  • [T]he world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing …. [from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in aid of the aforementioned re-orientation].
  • There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes. (Ernest Hemingway via Kevin D. Williamson)
  • Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. (Andrew Davison, likely channeling Henri de Lubac)
  • “Today,” says de Lubac, “when the essential doctrine of the unity of the human race is attacked, mocked by racism,” we should feel anguish that it is so weakly defended by Christian leaders. (James R. Wood)
  • Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. (David Brooks in his farewell NYT column)

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.

2026!

The best thing about New Years Day 2026 is that it means 2025 is over. President Ozymandias really hit the ground running for his second term, having surrounded himself with evil, shrewd, and power-hungry operatives this time instead of Republican normies who muted his bellowing. It’s hard to imagine (knocks on wood) that the worst of the self-aggrandizing vandalism isn’t over now.

Wordplay

Aphorisms

A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.

Adapted from The World in a Phrase for an Atlantic article.

Selected sentences of the year

  • In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank responded to some Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa.)
  • In The Atlantic, David A. Graham processed the addition of “Trump” to “Kennedy” in the moniker for Washington’s premier performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)
  • In Esquire, Dave Holmes acknowledged that Senator Lindsey Graham was maybe joking that Trump should be the next pope — but maybe not: “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
  • In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rued the effect of obsessive replays on the determination of what, in pro football, constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier,” he wrote. “It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.” (Bill Sclafani, Rockport, Mass.)
  • \[I\]n The Washington Post, Ron Charles assessed “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.” (Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Hannah Reich, Queens, among others)
  • Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
  • In The Times, Kevin Roose worried that when it comes to regulations, the stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of A.I.: “It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
  • In The Times, A.O. Scott sang a similar song: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Charles Kelley, Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser, Durham, N.C., among others)

Frank Bruni, The Best Sentences of 2025 (shared link)

I saved three of Bruni’s best as personal favorites:

  • Also in The Times, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling considered the importance of an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz., and Hillary Ellner, Durham, N.C., among others)
  • In The Times, James Hamblin parodied the typical message and script of a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
  • In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson gave thanks for academia, despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.” (Dan Markovitz, Corte Madera, Calif.)

The first just feels perfect; “explosive ear discharge” in the second was the only thing in the list that made me laugh uncontrollably; Kevin Williamson captures perhaps the single most tragic thing about what “we” are doing, (purely by coincidence, of course, during the second reign of the orange barbarian).

Finally: “Some of you should walk a mile in my shoes, because then you would be a mile away from me. Keep the shoes.” (Encountered by my wife on Pinterest)

My 2025

Reading

As I always note in my footer, I blog and socialize at micro.blog in addition to here. One of my friendlies at MB, an uncommonly sane Evangelicalish pastor in Chicagoland (very keen on racial reconciliation is he), posted his 2025 reading list and inquired about what others read this year.

My response:

At 77, I feel the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck, and I already own more books than I’ll get read before he wins. Further, I’ve read many, many books in my life already, including multiple books on many perennial themes. And although I love poetry, I either had poor teachers or was too barbarian to learn how to read demanding examples.

So I don’t have much toleration for books that are cumulative of what I already understand, or are neither pleasurable nor (so far as I can tell after reading a bit) profitable, including ones that many good people were raving about.

To avoid performative listing, then (e.g., Geoffrey Hill poetry, which defeated me utterly), I’ve eliminated all the books I abandoned part way in. Finally, listing a volume of poetry doesn’t mean I’ve read it all yet.

BookAuthor
Rings TrilogyTolkien
Albion’s SeedDavid Hackett Fischer
The World After LiberalismMatthew Rose
CoracleKenneth Steven
Table for TwoAmor Towles
Till We Have FacesC.S. Lewis
GodricBeuckner
StalingradAnthony Beever
Small Is BeautifulSchumacher
Rilke PoetryRilke
ApocryphaStephen De Young
The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian TraditionPhilip Sherrard
A Time of GiftsPatrick Leigh Fermor
The New Science of the Enchanted UniverseMarshall Sahlins
Bread & Water, Wine & OilFr. Meletios Webber
Lost in the CosmosWalker Percy
Giovanni’s RoomJames Baldwin
The Long LonelinessDorothy Day
The innocence of Father BrownG.K. Chesterton
Against the MachinePaul Kingsnorth
You Have Arrived at Your DestinationAmor Towles
The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and EqualityGlen Scrivener
The Year of Magical ThinkingJoan Didion
The Old Man and the SeaHemingway
The Wisdom of Father BrownChesterton
IstanbulOrhan Pamuk
The Wizard of the KremlinGiuliano da Empoli
The Irony of American HistoryNiebuhr
Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New YorkFrancis Spufford
The Bovadium FragmentsTolkien

On deck for 2026: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (along with Christmas gift books and a few dozen others).

Strange doings

Extra pills are piling up across America. Excessive refills by U.S. pharmacies cost Medicare and patients $3 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to a WSJ analysis of Medicare prescription data.

WSJ. Based on my own rigorous anecdata, this is 1000% true. Which means that although mail-order pharmacies may have started it, brick-and-mortar local pharmacies are in the game now, too.

I really would rather not manually refill every prescription, but my pharmacy seems incapable of waiting 90 days to refill a 90-day prescription, and when I get a text that a prescription is ready for pick-up, I go pick it up (with rare exceptions, like a post-op opioid painkiller I definitely did not need).

Tech

Deepfakes

2025 appears to have been the years when deepfake videos became convincing. Ted Gioia sees all kinds of problems coming from that:

Sam sans souci

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves.

AI Chatbots Linked to Psychosis, Say Doctors. I can scarcely see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go right, because friendship is a right-hemisphere sort of thing that AI sucks at.

Politics

MTG Repents

Nothing in her political career before September inclined me to cut Marjorie Taylor Green any slack whatever, but something has happened since then.

Her political conversion story, if you can call it that (it’s not about changing from MAGA to progressive or any other political position), rings true.

It started at the Charlie Kirk Memorial service:

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump and MAGA – The New York Times — Original profile (gift link).

I thought at the time that should have been a wake-up call for every “Christian” Trump supporter in America. I still do. It speaks ominous things about our religious and political culture that it seems to have awoken so few.

But Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people, recognized it! And it appears that she has genuinely repented of her role in stoking hatred and division!

Time will tell; she’s been taking the potent MAGA pill for a long time, and withdrawal may prove too hard. But it’s looking good so far.

I wish her what I wished for Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981: a long and happy and private life — plus a sustained repentance.

Paganism with worship music

We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)

David Brooks, How to Survive the Trump Years with Your Spirit Intact (gift link).

That last sentence is golden.

Christianity without Christ

“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” Ross Douthat warned presciently at the dawn of Trumpism in 2016. … What Douthat calls the “post-religious right” certainly is more obnoxious and morally degenerate than its Bush-era forebear was, but it’s not correct to call a movement that’s developed its own alternate morality “post-religious.” It’s not even correct to call it “post-Christian,”…

The modern right is boisterously Christian, but without Christ. It extols Christianity aggressively but has ditched most of the moral content …

…

The purest expression of Christianity without Christ came from Trump himself, not coincidentally. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, shortly after Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved viewers by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, the president strode to the mic and said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” That’s the literal antithesis of Christian morality …

But there were no mass defections by Christians from the president’s camp after his heresy. Erika Kirk herself remains a loyal Trump ally in good standing. And why not? Hating one’s enemies is squarely in line with the three purposes of post-Christ right-wing Christianity. The first is establishing the right’s cultural hegemony over other American factions; the second is narrowing the parameters of the right-wing tribe to exclude undesirables; and the third is deemphasizing morality as a brake on ruthlessness toward one’s opponents.

When populist chuds taunt Jews like Ben Shapiro by hooting “Christ is king” or walk onstage at political rallies brandishing their rosaries as if they’re trying to repel Dracula, they’re not expressing earnest Christian witness. They’re signaling that there’s a hierarchy in America and that Christians properly sit atop it.

…

That’s Christianity without Christ.

Nick Catoggio

Alt-Right

Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy.

Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism

At the outset of debate

If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community. And even if at the end of the day we have to conclude that we all do not want the same goods (which can, alas, happen), it is better that we learn it at the end of the day than decide it before sunrise.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

WASPs

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

The contumely of allies

We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism.

Reinhold Niehbur, The Irony of American History

Read the fine print

On the surface, it would seem that the assurances given in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia were clear and unequivocal. But lurking in the shadowy annals of communist polemics there was a catch. To paraphrase, but not distort, Lenin’s position, nations have the right to self-determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide. And, as if that were not enough, only the Communist Party can speak for the proletariat.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

Raising the bar for Tinhorn Dictators

Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice.

Bob Smietana, Is Dave Ramsey’s empire the ‘best place to work in America’? Say no and you’re out

Shorts

  • A new crop of moderate Democrats is trying to counter both President Trump and progressive influence in their own party. (WSJ) May their tribe increase.
  • And so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America)
  • Conservative and mainstream media were drifting apart, not just ideologically but epistemically… (Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge) This epistemic drift (of the Right, I think, not the mainstream) tempts me to despair.
  • “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” … was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • One category I used to apply to some of my posts became obsolete almost overnight around 1/20/2017: Zombie Reaganism. You never see that any more, and I miss it more than I thought I would.

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.

Thursday, 12/4/25

Luxury Beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk, Luxury Beliefs Are Real.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the young man who coined this phrase. It strikes me as analogous to the whoring and wenching of the rich and famous which does not, shall we say, translate well to kids in The Projects (but is more like a transgressive raised-middle-finger than a “belief”).

The Hive Mind

Consider this ominous anecdote from Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

I require substantial writing in my 400-person U.S. history survey course—but now I largely receive 400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical.

This is eerily like the zombie-ish characters in Pluribus, who all say the exact same thing.

But in Mintz’s case, this is real behavior from real students. They have voluntarily abandoned their individual opinions and embraced the hive mind.

And the hive mind is available to all of them via Chat GPT.

…

I actually take some solace in TV series such as Pluribus and Severance. They show how anxious we are about this threat. At some deep level in our souls, we know that the destruction of our autonomy and selfhood is not a good thing.

It isn’t progress. It isn’t utopia. It isn’t liberation.

And that is the first step in escaping the ant hill. The next step is to bring others along with us.

This is why I keep talking about a New Romanticism (see here and here). That is our counter-offensive, and it’s already starting.

Ted Gioia, The New Anxiety of Our Time Is Now on TV (bold added)

Fundamental law

Ultimately, however, constitutionalism means that society must accept an unpopular policy that respects constitutional limits over a popular policy that violates them. The very foundation of constitutionalism is that certain fundamental protections—whether for free speech or the separation of powers—must be beyond the reach of popular majorities. There will almost always be some policy that is popular but unconstitutional.

Andrew O’Donohue on “court-baiting.”

The Reality of Irreligious Violence

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.

I have published this on several Sundays over the years, I’m sure, but with our POTUS and ever-so-manly-and-full-of-lethality “Secretary of War” gleefully murdering supposed drug dealers in the Caribbean in the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” it seems like a worthy weekday reminder now.

As a Chosen People with what Niebuhr refers to as a “Messianic consciousness,” Americans came to see themselves as set apart, their motives irreproachable, their actions not to be judged by standards applied to others.

Andrew Bacevich in his Introduction to a 2008 University of Chicago Edition of Rheihold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History.

Shorts

  • What’s important to notice is that it isn’t, and never was, “Orthodoxy is masculine.” It only felt masculine, in comparison with the general run of American churches. (Frederica Matthewes-Green)
  • Put someone with a complex about not being respected in charge of an agency with guns and you’re asking for trouble. (Nick Catoggio, A Few Bad Men)
  • The problem is not so much that public policy has failed as that it has succeeded at the wrong things. (Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld