Category: wordplay

Saturday Truth in Advertising

Not really politics

Res ipsa loquitur

It is satisfying to manifest oneself concretely in the world, through manual competence; it has been known to make a person quiet and easy. It seems to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself, to vindicate his worth. He can remain quiet and simply point: The building stands, the lights are on, the car now runs.

Matthew Crawford, What School Didn’t Teach Us: Your Place in the World

I tend to forget how strange was the childhood of the brilliant and quirky Matthew Crawford. Read the item to see what I mean.

Bon mots

  • In The Washington Post, Amanda Katz noted that Kennedy had terminated his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, “ending a dilemma for voters torn between their love of deportation camps and their love of measles.”
  • In The New Yorker, Helen Rosner sampled the classic fare at a nearly 90-year-old French restaurant in Manhattan that received a recent sprucing-up: “You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon.”

Via Frank Bruni

  • “I don’t know if Democrats fully realize how damaging the image of the possible first woman president being incapable of giving an interview alone without the presence of a man to help her is,” – Meghan McCain.
  • “It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” – Lila Rose, anti-abortion activist, on Trump’s latest pivot. (D’ya think?)

Via Andrew Sullivan

Politics generally

A Thrill for Nerds

Political highlight of 2024: The Democrats selecting a successor to feeble President Joe Biden without panic about needing to re-do the primary elections.

I wasn’t politically sophisticated when the parties decided to turn over the selection of their Presidential candidates to whoever deigned to show up at a primary election (run at government expense, with government’s thumb on the scales to maintain the present two parties), but I was alive and aware. Because I was a snot-nosed kid, I probably thought it was a great idea.

It wasn’t. It took the selection from pros who wanted to win the election and turned it over to “the base”, which eventually would want maximalist trolling of the other duopoly party. Therein is a major source of our notorious “polarization,” at least among the noisier members of the parties.

If I haven’t said it before, I’m in favor of “smoke-filled rooms” or whatever other technique the parties choose to select candidates at their own expense. I heard one where they suggested non-binding primaries — a way to create a presumptive nominee, but giving the party a opportunity to bail out if the people’s choice is an idiot or semi-comatose.

(This rant inspired by Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast with the fabulous Yuval Levin.)

One picture, many words

…

Two things about the image stood out. One is the preposterous idea that “America” is accurately represented by five populist edgelords, all of whom live in close proximity at the ends of the proverbial horseshoe. But that’s in keeping with modern Republican mythology about Trump’s movement reflecting a supposed silent majority: If the only people who count as “real Americans” are those on Team MAGA, then sure, a coalition that runs the gamut from left-leaning Putin apologists to right-leaning Putin apologists is a fair portrait of America.

The other thing that struck me was that Republicans evidently believe this image benefits them politically. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place as a country where Donald Trump is no longer weird enough in his own right to lock down “the weird vote” this fall and needs cover on his weirdo flank from the likes of Kennedy and Gabbard. Worse, he and his party seem to think there are more votes to be had by appealing to that weirdo bloc than there are to be lost among normie voters by doing so.

Nick Cattogio

The Dumb Crank Party

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. … The problem is that this hasn’t actually changed the fact that lots of people are dumb cranks; it’s simply created a Dumb Crank Party. And on balance, I think that has eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.

Matt Yglesias via The Morning Dispatch

Snare

My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

CPAC

CPAC was still a depressing place to be, a revival meeting for political fanatics. Only, instead of selling hope, the speakers were preaching anger and resentment.

Jon Ward, Testimony

Trump

Railing against the unpersuadables

A wise man once said that the business of punditry is persuasion. Assuming that’s true, we won’t be conducting any business today.

That’s because the subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem.

Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one: The right prides itself on being patriotic, and patriots rightly celebrate service members for the sacrifices they’ve made to defend America. If Trump were to stoop to his usual boorishness in attacking an opponent’s military record, it was thought, he might at last discover a line he’s not allowed to cross.

How naive we were. The rest of this column could be spent revisiting his various affronts to military honor over the years: goofing on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam; “feuding” with a Muslim Gold Star family in 2016; confiding in aides that he didn’t want wounded veterans in a parade because it “doesn’t look good for me;” declining to visit an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 for fear, allegedly, that his hair would get wet in the rain; saying on the same trip, according to four separate sources cited by The Atlantic, that the cemetery was “filled with losers” and that the Marines at Belleau Wood were “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.

John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who went on to become Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed all of it on the record to CNN last October. According to The Atlantic, when Trump accompanied Kelly in 2017 on a visit to the grave of the general’s son Robert, who was himself killed in Afghanistan years earlier, he turned to Kelly and said of the fallen, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

In a test of credibility between a man with a dubious record of draft deferments on the one hand and a highly decorated officer who lost his son in combat on the other, it’s no contest: The right chooses to believe that Kelly, not Trump, is the liar. That’s what being “persuasion-proof” means …

All of this feels familiar, no?

Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it.

He succeeded at Arlington and might yet succeed in the other matter. That’s what happens when a gangster by temperament leads a gang that includes millions of people: In nearly every dispute, the personal cost of litigating that dispute will be greater for his opponents than it will be for him. Not coincidentally, according to military sources who spoke to the New York Times, the reason the cemetery employee chose not to press charges over the alleged altercation is that “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” an entirely reasonable concern.

…

Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so?

Nick Catoggio, Mourning in America

Transactional Trump

Trump was never on the social conservatives’ side. He courted them and sought their approval as a function of his desire for status, power, and his own aggrandizement. If they had achieved political results that could benefit him, he would still be seeking their support, but now he sees them as an obstacle and an embarrassment. If you are seeking to manipulate, influence, or transact business with Trump by all means flatter him, but always understand that he was never your friend and will always turn on you the moment you pose an obstacle to his ambitions.

Analysis of an anonymous friend of Rod Dreher

No Pro-Life Case for Trump

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a philandering womanizer and twice divorced serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of rape, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who was closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even joked about Epstein’s alleged pedophiliac assaults of children, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who refused to straightforwardly answer when asked if he has ever paid for an abortion, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

Jake Meador, There Never Was a Pro-Life Case for Trump

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

4/30/24

The Surprising Truth About Handmaids

The heart of Gilead is not religious extremism, but social engineering.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Handmaids themselves, and the Ceremony that defines their role. The idea that women can be used outside of the confines of marriage as incubators for strongly desired children would be abhorrent to the vast majority of religious conservatives who seem to be The Handmaid’s Tale‘s targets. But it is all the rage in certain secular and progressive circles—and by no means is it limited to the fringes. It has become especially popular among homosexual couples, many of whom pay top dollar for Handmaids who serve a purpose they cannot fulfill themselves.

Not original with me, but I’ve lost the original source.

Schrödinger persons

On a related note:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

A cautionary tale

Argentina, for all it’s faults, is a Democracy, and the people keep electing very flawed politicians. They keep electing tumult, and choosing short term satisfaction. They keep voting for the candidate that promises to give them the most things, while also taking stuff away from others. They keep doing that because now, after a century of disarray, part of their national identity is a cynicism that’s reached nihilistic levels.

Chris Arnade

That sounds like the trajectory of another country I know well. I noticed a report this morning that Trump is 6 points ahead in (some) polls.

I can relax but I’m not going to enjoy it.

Aaron Burr = DJT

Charlie Sykes, The choice Republicans face is too good for me to just pull excerpts. I didn’t know what kind of low, narcissistic character Aaron Burr was, and how close he came to being President. We need some Alexander Hamiltons in the GOP (but I fear the GOP is too far gone).

David Frum painstakingly explains why Even Bill Barr Should Prefer Joe Biden by gaming out what’s likely to happen if Trump is elected. Maybe that will prove persuasive to a handful of Trump voters, but it suffices for me that Trump, like Aaron Burr, is a “dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and ‘a man of extreme & irregular ambition.’”

POTUS candidate age disparity

At the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, Joe Biden joked that age is an issue in the election, because “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” (New York Post)

The Free Press

Presidential immunity

Hungry for coverage of last Thursday’s SCOTUS arguments on Presidential criminal immunity, I was nauseous as most of my sources were doing the usual “we know this Court is corrupt; let us now find proof in the hypothetical questions they ask on this case we’re afraid might not go our way.”

Then finally I found sanity:

As several of the justices pointed out, they aren’t making a rule for Donald Trump. They’re making “a rule for the ages,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it—one that has to apply to good presidents and bad ones, Republicans and Democrats, high-minded prosecutors and partisan ones. It can be easy to focus on “the needs of the moment,” as Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

And here’s the fear. If the high court gives presidents too much immunity, the White House could turn into a “crime center,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. Too little immunity, and there’s an endless cycle of prosecutions. The ability to find some vague statute will “be used against the current president or the next president,” Kavanaugh said, “and the next president and the next president after that.”

So how will this all shake out? I can’t say for sure, of course. And oral arguments—even a two-hour and 40-minute session—can tell you only so much. But I predict this will be a unanimous ruling instructing the district court to determine which of the charged acts were clearly outside the authority of the president, whether it was an official act or not.

Sarah Isgur

Nellie’s miscellany

  • Every time you see the word disinformation, remember that The New York Times said it was “a conspiracy theory” that Covid came from a lab.
  • In Santa Monica, a new 122-unit homeless housing project is moving ahead; it’s projected to cost $1 million per unit to build. That’s the optimistic projection! And in San Francisco, the city built special housing just for the middle class. The result: 80 percent of units in some of these buildings are empty. Why? “A city bureaucracy so convoluted that qualifying for an apartment involves a tortured and time-consuming process,” according to a great San Francisco Chronicle story. I promise that if you let capitalism work, supply will meet demand. Alternatively, we can keep trying these government scams, raise taxes to 70 percent, and build more empty construction and overpriced pot shops and Sombritas and a single charging station.

Nellie Bowles

(See comment below, which puts )

Wordplay

  • the Daily Stormer of gender woo
  • ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand
  • the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science
  • people who care less about being right than looking virtuous
  • “communicators” … whose job is to make consensus look sciency

Mary Harrington, Why the centrists changed their trans tune – UnHerd

dire normalization

David Frum’s odd characterization of a televised Biden-Trump Presidential debate: “The networks want their show, but to give the challenger equal status on a TV stage would be a dire normalization of his attempted coup.”

Xitter

Someone’s (Charlie Sykes? coinage for X, formerly known as Twitter. I like it for the rich possibilities of how to pronounce it.

Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Touch Screens Are Ruining Cars – The Atlantic

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 4/11/24

Permanence

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

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

Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”

Feckless Diktator

Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.

The Morning Dispatch

What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!

NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels

“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”

Kyle Neddenriep

I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”

Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.

Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?

I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-life chorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.

Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.

So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.

For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)

Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is in the Air (2021)

Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.

Gaining Perspective

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Can we afford the rich?

While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:

“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”

Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:

“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”

Dense Discovery, quoting Why the world cannot afford the rich

Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!

Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.

On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.

…

Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.

Trump Blows Up Anti-Terror Surveillance – WSJ

Modernists losing copyright protection

For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Back home in Indiana

The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:

BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.

Indiana Court Rejects Claim That Driver’s Licenses Must Include Third Gender Option

I appreciate living in a state that isn’t “way out there” to either extreme.

Wordplay

1

… umbraphilia — the love of eclipses …

Where You Can See the Next Total Solar Eclipse, in 2026 – The New York Times

2

You cannot make a competitive selection process a tool for equality, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.

Freddie deBoer

3

Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

4

Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

5

fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick], Una Sancta: Fundamentalism, Ecumenism and the One True Church

6

… the Netherlands, a country so flat it feels it’s been ironed into submission.

Chris Arnade

7

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

St. John Climacus Saturday

Culture

Elite or not?

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%” while making up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Michael Cuenco, Car dealers will decide America’s future.

Cuenco seems to overlook the difference between wealth and prestige.

Sportsball

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

Eugene McCarthy, via the Economist’s World in Brief

Dictator or not?

On the drive into Budapest from the airport, travelers can see billboards erected by the Hungarian political opposition, featuring a photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the slogan “God? Homeland? Pedophilia!” It’s a reference to the recent scandal involving a presidential pardon of a politically connected man who had been convicted of aiding in a pedophilia cover-up. The scandal cost the ruling Fidesz party its top two female politicians: President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga.

Associating the prime minister, who apparently did not know about the pardon until the media reported it, and who quickly called for resignations of these top allies, is a low blow. But that’s how it goes in Hungary. Fidesz is not above similar tactics. If you expect Magyar politics to be a tea party, you are going to be disappointed.

Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now? 

… Hungary, which supposedly groans under the burden of the Orban dictatorship, enjoys far more freedom of expression than countries whose media and whose leaders condemn it as repressive. You have to wonder why.

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative (no paywall).

Eugenics for the age of The Machine

Servility

Will we reach the point where nobody thinks they could start their own little business?

Political

Meet the new boss, Trumpier than the old boss

Washington Post: Was the 2020 Election Stolen? Job Interviews at RNC Take an Unusual Turn.

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Donald Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

The Morning Dispatch

Trump’s faith

The closest I get to liking Donald Trump is when he evinces contempt for those who idolize him.

I feel guilty about that, as one shouldn’t sympathize with con artists. But you know how it is with scams: At a certain point of extreme gullibility, the mark starts to seem more contemptible than the person preying on them. If you’re still falling for “Nigerian prince” emails in 2024, the problem lies chiefly with you, not with the flimflam man responsible.

The sheer laziness with which Trump has courted evangelical voters since 2015 has always betrayed a degree of sincere disdain for them that’s unusual in a man not otherwise known for honesty. It would have been trivially easy for him to brush up on Christian dogma after he entered politics in the name of convincing the Republican base that he’d seen the light after a dissolute adulthood. But … he couldn’t be bothered to do so.

He’s never cared enough about the faith espoused by most of his supporters to even pretend to take it seriously.

That’s how we ended up with him once famously rendering “2 Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians.” And listing “an eye for an eye” as his favorite Bible verse instead of something from the Gospels. And admitting at an evangelical forum that he couldn’t recall ever having asked for God’s forgiveness.

A man who lies like he breathes somehow can’t get motivated to lie persuasively about being pious, even as a gesture of minimal respect for his own fans. That’s remarkable. And insofar as most evangelicals have shrugged it off and rolled over for him anyway, my sympathies lie more with him. He’s been sending them the political equivalent of “Nigerian prince” emails for nine years; if they haven’t wised up yet, that’s a problem with them more so than with Trump.

…

His first political priority, even above maximizing his chances of reelection, is purging the Republican Party of anyone who would question his right to rule. He doesn’t want independent-minded Christians in the GOP any more than he wants the traditional conservatives who preferred Nikki Haley in the primary. He’ll win without them—and if he can’t, he’ll at least have consolidated his power over one-half of America’s political establishment in the process.

In that context, whether by design or by happenstance, the “Trump Bible” operates as a sort of litmus test for evangelicals who have stuck with him this far through thick and thin. You won’t abandon me if I make a mockery of your faith, will you? No, of course you won’t.

…

The devolution of evangelicalism in the Trump era is itself an interesting mix of radicalism and transactionalism, mirroring Trump’s personality. Many Christians made a cynical bargain with him in 2016, suppressing their moral discomfort and offering him their votes in exchange for guarantees that he’d enact their agenda, starting with limits on abortion. Insofar as his poor character and irreligiosity troubled them, some may have idly hoped that their influence over him, and the influence of figures like Mike Pence, would turn his heart toward God in time. He might be remade in Christianity’s image.

That transaction didn’t pan out the way they’d hoped. For many, Christianity has been remade in his image.

Nick Catoggio, The True Faith

How to reach Republicans with the anti-Trump Gospel

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.

He thinks Donald Trump’s voters see him as akin to King Cyrus or King David in the Bible, a flawed messenger, so it’s best to use a biblical narrative about betrayal.

“If you say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy, rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’”

James Carville profile by Maureen Dowd

What’s behind “Lawfare”?

I submit that what changed when Trump entered the political arena on the highest levels isn’t that he gained powerful enemies who resolved to take him down by any means possible, nefarious or otherwise. What changed is that he was now a magnet for all kinds of scrutiny—journalistic as well legal …

Isn’t this the most obvious thing in the world? What is the first thing that anyone entertaining a run for the White House is asked by anyone who understands the process? Do you have any skeletons in the closet? Better get them out in the open now, because they will be discovered during the course of the campaign, and they will sink you, especially if you seek to cover it up.

Because Trump’s alleged crimes and misdeeds were extremely complex and deeply embedded in his sprawling business empire—and because the wheels of justice (rightly) grind extremely slowly—it’s taken many years for numerous lines of investigation to culminate in several trials all at roughly the same time, just as Trump is gearing up for a third attempt to win the White House. That’s not great. But as Jonathan Chait has argued quite cogently, the reason why it’s happening is that Donald Trump is a crook! If he wanted to continue getting away with being a crook, he could have decided not to run for president! Instead, he launched a campaign, won, lost, and is now running again. That’s nearly nine years (and counting) of ensuring the Klieg lights of public scrutiny are trained on every aspect of his life and business. What did he expect?

Since Trump trends toward imbecility, he may be surprised and outraged about this. But his defenders really should know better.

Damon Linker, Seven More Months of … This?

Ronna McDaniels’ excellent NBC adventure

Jonah Goldberg on NBC’s difficulty finding commentators to defend Trumpy positions:

I’ve said it a million times on here: When we were all growing up, […] the word “RINO” meant someone who was squishy on abortion, or taxes, or foreign policy, or something like that. It was about issues. Now, by Trump’s own admission, RINO only refers to people insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. And so you get this weird kind of thing where you have to find people who are supposedly intelligent conservatives who are also willing to talk about Donald Trump as if he’s comrade Stalin. And that’s a really tiny universe of people because it almost demands that you have no integrity or that you lie. And that’s how Ronna McDaniel starts to look attractive.

Wordplay

Tina Brown assessed King Charles: “Even with the best prognosis for his cancer, he has been left with a rueful rump of a reign.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)

Jesse Green reviewed a new Broadway production: “Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony. At ‘The Notebook,’ I was the person next to you.” (Christopher Flores, San Antonio)

And Bret Stephens, conversing with Gail Collins, skewered the social media site affiliated with Donald Trump: “I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.” (Ross Payne, Windermere, Fla.)

Clipped from Frank Bruni

Wordplay 7/5/23

1

turning dumb luck to smart luck

Lewis Hyde via Martin Shaw

2

“A gentle reminder of the word ‘matutolypea’: grumpiness or downheartedness first thing in the morning. Based on Latin and Greek, literally ‘morning grief’, or ‘sorrow of the dawn,’” – Susie Dent.

Via Andrew Sullivan. This is so alien to my experience that I’m unlikely to add it to my vocabulary

3

Quiddity was used almost as synonymous with homeliness (see the tertiary definition) by Michael Ward in After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.

4

Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism.

Mary Harrington in Feminism Against Progress, quoted by Helen Lewis. After clipping this quote, I read so much other detail about Harrington’s new book that it’s now living on my Kindle, waiting its turn.

5

Being

plugged in The Free Press [is] the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review.

Helen Lewis

6

Every nation is selfish and every nation considers its selfishness sacred.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry (via The Economist)

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

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Summer Solstice 2023

Culture

Commencement Wisdom

I’ve always liked the story with the punchline “What the hell is water?” But I don’t think I’d ever read the full commencement address from which I got it.

Quite good, with anticipations of Iain McGillchrist and of “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to;” but David Foster Wallace’s way may be better.

Is SCOTUS out of step?

About the Supreme Court, the New York Times wants to know “whether the court’s decisions are out of step with public opinion.” Here is the answer to that question:

It does not matter.

The law says what the law says. The job of the Supreme Court is to apply the law, not to make up the law, not to reform the law, not to ensure that the law accords with public opinion. If public opinion is opposed to the law, then the public can elect new lawmakers and write new laws. It is not up to the Supreme Court to do that for them. If representative democracy means anything, it is that the law is made by lawmakers who are elected by the people and democratically accountable to them.

…

Even Nina Totenberg has noticed that the progressives on the Supreme Court are more inclined toward bloc voting while the so-called conservatives are more inclined toward intellectual disagreement. If your bookie took bets on how individual justices were going to vote in any given hot-button case, you’d make more money betting on the progressives, who are predictable. When it comes to their most important political commitments, they sometimes have reached their decision before the first arguments are made.

Kevin D. Williamson, When Public Opinion Is Irrelevant.

I’m not sure how Williamson supports that last sentence, but otherwise it’s solid.

Damon Linker’s sober assessment

I’m not really interested in debating the substance of the issue. I’m fully vaccinated, so is my wife, and so are my kids. That includes several rounds of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine. But I’m not anything close to being a medical doctor or an expert on immunology or epidemiology. I’m not even an especially informed amateur observer of issues in public health. What I am is a broadly well-educated writer and citizen who trusts doctors, public-health professionals, government agencies, and the media’s myriad mechanisms of publicity to provide me with accurate information about the world. I trust that since tens of millions of Americans (and hundreds of millions more all over the world) have taken these vaccines, I would have heard about it in the form of a blockbuster news story if they actually did more harm than good.

But note: I don’t know that vaccines are safe in the same way that I know it’s a cloudy day in the Philadelphia suburbs, where I live and am writing this post. And this is true about an enormous number of things. Anytime anyone says “I know X” about a matter that goes beyond direct personal experience—I can see the clouds outside my window with my own eyes—it implicitly involves an act of trust: “I know X because Y says X, and I trust that Y knows what s/he is talking about and wouldn’t deceive me.”

Do you distrust the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci? Fine. But why would that lead you to trust RFK or Joe Rogan more? Just because they’re not employed by the government?

Why indeed? I know full well that governments lie to me constantly — but nowhere near so constantly that I can say “government said it so it must be a lie.” But what I also know believe is that crackpots and grifters are even less reliable than the government (do I really need to cite examples?), and that I lack the time and the knowledge to personally check out every contrarian claim.

Especially at age 74, I am very aware of my mortality, and of the much higher priorities for spending the time until that day.

Maslow’s Hierarchy, level 1

For all I complain about the empty materialism of the West, there is a certain level of wealth essential to human happiness, below which family, faith, and work as a craft, isn’t solace enough. We need a certain amount of stuff to escape the drudgery and toil of existence. That level is probably somewhere above Senegal ($1,800 per capita GDP) and below Vietnam ($4,000).

Chris Arnade

Vote your vice

The policies implementing the Sexual Revolution now have the priority that peace and prosperity used to occupy in political loyalties and discourse. The revolutionary ideology now holds the place of esteem once held by the Judeo-Christian religions.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

In general, I did not care for this book, but this particular point is powerful. The Biden administration has proven the truth of it vividly in its enthusiastic celebrations of Pride Month. (If you missed the details, Rod Dreher is ever ready to fill you in.)

The late Joseph Sobran said decades ago that the Democrats had become the “vote your vice” party. It has only gotten worse (with an admixture of perverse obsequiousness toward transgender ideology).

(I grant that there are vices other than sexual, and that when Republicans are in power they either leave the declining status quo untouched or else pass performative and draconian bans that the courts strike down on various grounds, some of those grounds being solid.)

Scotomas

Speaking of vice, the current issue of The American Conservative devotes its current issue to the topic.

Yup. They’ve got the biggies:

  • Porn
  • Gambling
  • Marijuana
  • Witchcraft
  • Social Media

But I almost laughed out loud at the absence of binge drinking and at the article titled and subtitled The No Smoking Garden: The crusade against tobacco has depended on shameless propaganda.

I’m thinking the common thread here is “calls to legalize newer vices are bad; traditional legal vices are fine.”

This is typical of why I keep waiting for The American Conservative to realize that my subscription has lapsed.

Don’t worry; science has it all figured out

(An archaeologist finds a motel centuries hence:)

Surrounding almost the entire complex was a vast flat area, marked with parallel white lines. In several of the spaces stood freely interpreted metal sculptures of animals. To avoid the misunderstanding that often arises with free interpretation, each sculpture was clearly labeled. They were inscribed with such names as Cougar, Skylark, and Thunderbird, to name but a few. The importance of animal worship in Yank burial customs has never been more clearly illustrated.

David Macaulay, Motel of the Mysteries

Politics

Donald Trump as an occasion of sin

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about.

Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism. When you see well-meaning people on your side who were catastrophically wrong about profound moral and political issues, humility comes more easily.

These days, however, many conservatives are so ridiculous that I fear they are robbing us liberals of that well-earned humility.

Nicholas Kristof, In the Age of Trump, It’s Hard to Be Humble

Florida Man is one-of-a-kind

Peter Wehner can always be counted on to oppose Florida Man, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head more squarely than other times:

  • Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
  • Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.
  • Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.
  • Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.

Mind you, I’m among those who succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (the first Presidency so to afflict me), so I can’t fault Wehner for a bit of obsessiveness.

What is the reason for Mike Pence?

Pence recently did an interview with right-wing radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, in which he refused to say whether he’d pardon Trump once in office. The hosts wanted Trump pardoned, and Pence basically had three answers. First, he riffed on the fact that he believes these are “serious charges” and he “can’t defend what’s been alleged.” Second, he says it’s “premature” to discuss a pardon because we don’t know what “the president’s defense is” or “what are the facts.” And then third, he says “we either believe in our judicial process in this country or we don’t; we either stand by the rule of law or we don’t.”

…

Normally, I’m not impressed with candidates who refuse to answer questions because they look like they’re being evasive for political reasons. The lack of authenticity is like nails on a chalkboard. But here, it actually is a real answer. He thinks the charges are real, but he’s open to hearing Trump’s side of the story.

Sarah Isgur. She analyzes the other GOP candidates, too.

Pence is right, but being right often requires nuance for which voters have no patience.

I was aware of, but did not share, a Pence Derangement Syndrome when he was Governor of Indiana. I have nothing in particular against him now. But on 1/6/21, he assuredly was aware that by honoring our electoral college system over the shenannigans of Florida Man, he was ending his political career.

In 2023, Pence is a stone-cold loser, lacking even the “what the hell, why not tell the truth?” rationale of Chris Christie.

Wordplay

1

Filiation and affiliation

The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge.

James Matthew Wilson

2

Mr. Robertson ran for president in 1988, hoping to channel evangelistic popularity from his growing television empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network, into Republican political might. Ultimately he failed — even devout Christians worried about the intensity with which the celebrity minister blended church and state.

And yet, by the time of his death on Thursday, the vision he championed had gained more power than he could have ever thought possible. The alliance between evangelical Christianity and Republican politics has fused, even as America has grown increasingly secular. The polarizing rhetoric of his often inflammatory views has become a defining feature of American politics.

Elizabeth Dias at the New York Times, writing about the political side of Pat Robertson, who died June 8. (Emphasis added)

“Evangelistic popularity” is pretty clumsy. It skips over primary and secondary meanings of evangelism and evangelistic to mash up a tertiary meaning (a meaning which I suggest arose from journalistic misusage, which eventually “makes proper” I guess, as “literal” now is a hyperbolic form of “metaphorical.”)

I have no idea, apart from context, what happens when an alliance fuses, and I’m not persuaded by it.

3

hysteria

Boy! I had never stopped to think how loaded that word is!

“Mass hysteria” is out; “psychogenic illness” is in.

4

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

5

Getting offended by something on the internet is like choosing to to step in dog crap instead of walking around it.

Found by my wife on Pinterest

6

ESPN is now a gambling-promotion network that finds sports useful.

Alan Jacobs

7

holobionts: a united meta-organism whose components evolve in concert with each other. (The idea of “holobionts” represents a paradigm shift in biology). See also, of course, Wikipedia.

8

Word of the Era: Religion

I recently read Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept 📚 The idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history. That’s not a complete surprise to me, but I’d never before read so much on how that came about. Spoiler alert: there’s a bit of cultural imperialism in the sense of “imposing” on other cultures how the secularized West parses things.

9

Baksheesh, a word meaning bribes in Arabic, which police frequently ask for in Egypt. Read the full story.

10

Happiness writes white ink on a white page.

Henry de Montherlant via Things Worth Remembering: The Joy of Requited Love

This probably is in the same thought constellation as how notoriously hard it is to create compelling good fictional characters.

11

“Random” vs. “Mystery”

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known … To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns … But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

12

From Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences” segment:

A

We can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Maureen Dowd

B

So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly

Andrew Coyne

C

What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, “we are what we pretend to be.”

Tom Nichols on the transmogrification of J.D. Vance into a Trumpist.

D

Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site.

Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell

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

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Largely wordplay (6/1/23)

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

Revanchist.

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

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

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

breaking news bias

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

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

Sarah Isgur

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

H/T Jonah Goldberg, who continues:

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

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles anticipated Goldberg by a few days:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garrison Keillor

A civilization flourishes until it starts to analyze itself.

Alfred North Whitehead, via Iain McGilchrist

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

Excerpts from June 1:

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

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Wordplay

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

bellicose utopianism

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

stenographic process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even a bad man can get railroaded.

Peggy Noonan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, 5/12/23

Wordplay

(Let’s start with something pleasant.)

  • Murmur. An onomatopoeia that fascinates me because the Bible is chock-full of murmuring and murmurers.
  • Augur and inaugurate
  • Casserolades: concerts of banging pots and pans to signify political discontent. This seems to be a uniquely French thing. The demonstrators are called ‌casseroleurs.
  • Womb envy: [The envy that men may (or is it “allegedly”?) feel of the biological functions of the female. Contemporary womb-enviers are said to be prominent among those technicians making lavish claims of sentience for (misnamed) Artificial Intelligence. “It’s only natural that computer scientists long to create A.I. and realize a long-held dream.” (Jaron Lanier) (Side note: I guess it’s okay to recognize sexual dimorphism when the point it to belittle males.)
  • An ambient expectation of human subservience. The unarticulated requirement that humans do more and more common tasks in the manner required by digital designs. (Synthesized from the context of Jaron Lanier’s use of the term in There Is No A.I.)
  • A sensational scoop was tweeted last month by America’s National Public Radio: Elon Musk’s “massive space sex rocket” had exploded on launch. Alas, it turned out to be an automated mistranscription of SpaceX, the billionaire’s rocketry firm. (From the Economist, I believe.)

I’m glad a stuck around for Frank Bruni’s “For the Love of Sentences” after he commented on CNN’s Town Hall featuring DJT. Some gems through Bruni:

  • One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts … It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians. (Helen Lewis)
  • The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility. (Rachel Tashjian)
  • Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures. (Tom Holland)

Not Trump

(We now inch toward truly unpleasant truths, albeit colorfully expressed.)

The source of aesthetics, ethics (and folly)

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “core generator” of insights.

Garrison Keillor, scab?

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

Why I am not joining the strike | Garrison Keillor

Hell will be paid

The transgender movement now wields tremendous power, and many children are being transitioned long before they reach their teen years. They are being put on puberty blockers and going under the knife before they are old enough to vote, drink, or drive. Many will wake up one day and realize that their ability to conceive children and experience sexual pleasure was destroyed by the adult ideologues that they trusted.

Jonathon Van Maren, Life After Detransition.

I’d look forward to the malpractice judgments against the ideologues and profiteers were it not that every such judgment is inadequate redress for the kinds of harm they cause.

Professional Human Losers

I have a cyber-acquaintance (I was well aware of him even before cyberspace, though), Alan Jacobs, who’s something of a Christian Public Intellectual — a dying breed as he noted in a Harpers article a few years back. One of Jacobs’ muses in turn is Austin Kleon, whose postings he frequently shares, and at which I frequently yawn. That probably means I’m a shallow person — or that my brain and Jacobs feed on different things.

But this one caught my fancy as it catches our moment. I’ll just say it involves, and riffs off, Jeopardy Champ (now host) Ken Jennings losing to a supercomputer.

It’s short enough that I won’t risk, by quoting an excerpt, omitting something that might edify you, whose brain may also feed on different things than mine.

Analogy?

Mortician Bonasera/Don Corleone = Harlan Crow/Clarence Thomas
True or False?

If you answered “true”, you get an A+ from Brooke Harrington.

Because the publisher is the Atlantic (and the author isn’t Adam Serwer) the article is less than 100% meritless. But Harrington gives away her guttersnipe game when (a) she views any conservative justice’s friends as suspect and (b) she reports no similar friendships of liberal justices.

But wait! There’s more!

African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Easier, yes, but the captivity of these groups to the Democratic party is independent evidence of alignment with rich white liberals.

Fomenting stochastic violence

(Getting closer to the nasties …)

The law in its majesty neutrality has decided that people on both the Left and the Right can spout incendiary lies so long as the threat of violent response is not imminent. But I think the coinage “stochastic violence” or “stochastic terrorism” is nevertheless useful, and that “random” violence is sometimes (often?) rooted in lying rhetoric (and, as in the case of the January 6 insurrection, calling it “random” is a cop-out).

Setting the stage, deploring the actors

But who, sir, makes the [slave] trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Slavery aside, we still do this: we escalate our rhetoric and then damn the actual perpetrators of such stochastic terrorism as our rhetoric invited.

Or maybe, if we’re shameless enough, we’ll call the terrorism a …

Patriot Purge

Yeah! That’s the ticket!

If you infuse an issue or set of issues with religious intensity but drain a movement of religious virtue, then profound religious conflict — including violent conflict — is the inevitable result. Indeed, we saw religious violence on full display when a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and it is no coincidence that one of Carlson’s most mendacious projects was his effort to recast the Jan. 6 insurrection and its aftermath as a “patriot purge.”

Maybe I should leave it at that, but the author has more:

The more the Christian right latches on to cruel men, the more difficult it becomes to argue that the cruelty is a bug, not a feature …

Many Christians fear that kindness doesn’t “work,” so they discard it. This is how even decency itself becomes a “secondary value.” Aggression, not virtue, becomes the touchstone of political engagement, and anything other than aggression is seen as a sign of weakness.

Both quotes from David French, Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right

As someone who cannot remember ever watching Tucker Carlson’s segment in its entirety (who hasn’t encountered clips of him?), I can’t speak of his “cruelty” or “aggression” except to say that they were nowhere near my top-line impressions. Maybe that showed up when he singled out some random click-baity schmuck for ridicule?

Trump’s court loss

(Sigh! It’s time.)

We’ll all go down together

The first rule of the modern Republican Party, it’s said, is “You can’t criticize Trump.” But that’s not correct.

The actual rule is “You can’t take sides with the left against Trump.” It just so happens that every moral objection to Trump’s character and fitness is now “coded” as leftist …

In 2023, the question of Trump’s character has become a litmus test of right-wing authenticity. To deem him unfit for office is necessarily to have been corrupted by left-wing propaganda, even if the “propaganda” in question is Trump being accused of sexual misconduct by 20+ women and then being held liable for sexual abuse in court.

This explains why so many conservatives, elected and otherwise, resorted to grumbling about the “New York jury” after yesterday’s verdict. If the jurors were a bunch of partisan blue-state hacks, as their critics insinuate, it’s passing strange that they ended up finding Trump not liable on [raping] her. But since holding him accountable for any moral failing is behavior that’s now associated exclusively with Democrats, the belief on the right that the verdict could only have been tainted by politics will be inescapable.

That dynamic conveniently makes it impossible for Trump’s fitness for office to be challenged legitimately by someone on his own side, as challenging him on those grounds means you’re not on his side at all.

Reporter Benjy Sarlin captured the absurdity when he tweeted, “It’s hard to sum up the 2024 situation more succinctly than this: Trump is already calling DeSantis a groomer based 100% on innuendo with 0 penalty; and DeSantis cannot respond by citing an actual jury finding of sexual abuse.” It’s ludicrous. But it’s also completely rational for DeSantis and the rest of the field under the circumstances to overlook the Carroll trial, since to mention it would be to take sides with the left against Trump. And that would disqualify them, not him.

Nick Cattogio, Mostly Peaceful Sexual Abuse.

It is humiliating to live in a nation-state where Donald Trump could win the Presidential election not just once, but twice. But here is where my wife, friends, family and Church are, so I’ll stay and we’ll all go down together.

I’m quite confident that we’ll go down, but what do I know? I’m not a self-appointed “Apostle” or “Prophet” with power to declare that Donald Trump, right now, is our dulytruly-elected President.

Law or Donald Trump? Pick one.

[W]e watched as even Trump-nominated judges ruled time and again against Trump’s election challenges, yet a majority of Republicans still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to carry the 2020 election. When the choice is between the law and the evidence or Donald Trump, Republicans have consistently picked Trump.

But is sexual abuse different? Can an actual jury verdict — after a trial featuring all the due process that American law requires — finally break the bond with Trump?

Here is the darkest possible outcome to the case, one that I fear is more likely than not. The Republican public will either shrug at the result or will simply choose to disbelieve the jury, assuming without evidence that it was biased against Trump. Indeed, when asked about the verdict, Senator Marco Rubio told a Bulwark reporter, “That jury’s a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham said he questioned “the whole process” and told Punchbowl News, “I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby.”

But would a jury so hopelessly biased against Trump jury reject Carroll’s rape claim? Or is that an indication that the jury actually weighed the evidence supporting each charge?

David French

More Trump derangement

It’s deja vu all over again

Back when Trump first burst on the scene in the summer and fall of 2015, conservative pundits assured us the Republican electorate would reject him and opt for someone/anyone else. That turned out to be wrong—yet here we are nearly eight years later and often the very same people now assure us the Republican electorate would be rejecting Trump and embracing DeSantis if only the media weren’t playing dirty.

I don’t buy it.

Hey, I get it: Being wrong’s a bitch. Yet error can still be worthwhile if it serves as an opportunity to learn and course-correct. Right-leaning writers recognized this when they made the point against Democrats who spent the better part of the Trump administration blaming Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the New York Times, CNN—really anyone but themselves—for Clinton’s loss. But now these same conservatives refuse to subject themselves to the same degree of scrutiny and soul-searching.

Which means they are depriving themselves of the chance to adjust their thinking in the light of a bracing and crucially important truth about the Republican Party: That when given the choice between a know-nothing narcissist and moral cretin who embodies their resentments and channels their anger and hatred but accomplishes little and a candidate who’s spent years proving himself a vastly more competent, woke-slaying enemy of liberalism, the voters still prefer the first guy.

Decrying the fact doesn’t make it any less true.

Damon Linker

Bad Omen

I never did much criminal law, but this strikes me as a bad omen if your name is Donald Trump:

A Friday court filing revealed that at least eight of the 16 false Georgia electors who planned to declare former President Donald Trump the winner of their state’s 2020 presidential contest have accepted immunity deals in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation of attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The brief filed by the electors’ defense attorney shows the electors will be immune from prosecution if they testify truthfully in the probe.

The Morning Dispatch for May 8

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, 12/10/22

Politics

Georgia Voters Call B*llsh*t on Existential Threatism

If you’ve spent any time in Republican circles since 2016, you’re familiar with a particular pattern of GOP political pressure. No, pressure is perhaps too mild of a word. The better word is bullying. 

The pattern works like this. Trumpist activists seize disproportionate power in the grassroots, work with the Trump team to nominate Trumpist candidates, and then browbeat every conservative who raises objections in the general election. They use negative polarization (with a helpful assist from Democratic extremism) to present voters with the “binary choice.” 

Are you pro-life? Then you can’t vote for the Democrat. Are you worried about the border? Then you can’t vote for the Democrat. Even if the Republican’s character is so deficient that you wouldn’t want your kid working for them if they managed the local McDonald’s, the MAGA movement will yell, “Still better than the Democrat!”

It turns out that people don’t want to be bullied into the ballot box. It turns out a significant enough number of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters will turn to their own party and say, “Do better.” They’ll call the Trumpist bluff and turn the challenge back to them—if these issues are so vital, why are you nominating obviously deficient candidates? Why aren’t you taking the high demands of public office seriously? 

But this point becomes truly powerful only combined with this last observation. MAGA losses combined with normie Republican wins shows there’s life left in conservatism yet. Here’s the tale of the tape in Georgia: Walker was the only Republican this year to lose a statewide race.

David French, Georgia Exposed the Trumpist Scam (Emphasis added)

Of course, a similar argument applies to Democrats: If Doug Mastriano was an existential threat to democracy, why did you spend money to get him elected in the primary?

Bad Omen

Any Republican that’s out there trying to work with [Democrats] is wrong.

Kevin McCarthy, quoted in the Economist

Culture

What subscriptions should I cancel next?

One of my most vital convictions is summed up in this post: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” Americans have these wildly distorted views of people whom they perceive to be their political enemies because so many journalists and talking heads enrich themselves through stoking hatred. Those people should be utterly shunned.

Alan Jacobs, via a reminder from John Brady.

I’ve looked ahead on my list of books to read and eliminated a few based on this wise heuristic.

But what of newspaper editorials that say “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community” aired from “church pulpits” to “school board debates and libraries” causes people who’ve rarely or never darkened the door of any church open fire in gay bars and clubs? Aren’t those newspapers making bank on hatred?

Alan Jacobs at least is consistent. Last I knew, he read news once per week, on Friday, from The Economist, which doesn’t write such piffle.

Noble lies

The Matthew Shepard myth — that he was murdered by two redneck strangers because he was gay — is still widely believed, even though the hideous murder was far more complex and fundamentally about meth. The idea that the Pulse shooting was motivated by homophobia — not true — is routinely repeated …

This is not healthy. Noble lies are still lies. And lies always fail in the end.

…

“I sure hope Trump has some more brilliant ideas for can’t-miss Senate candidates. Omarosa maybe? Carrot Top? Ghislaine Maxwell?” – Ann Coulter on the Georgia runoff.

“Can’t believe Lindsey Graham’s pitch of ‘vote for the brain damaged guy to show you’re not racist’ fell short,” – Richard Hanania.

Andrew Sullivan

Wordplay, an occasional feature

When the right words won’t suffice

We are currently in a time, perhaps unprecedented, when talk about all kinds of sexual behavior is pervasive, even inescapable. And we Christians who value purity are very much on the outside, expressing beliefs that the culture can’t even understand. There’s little likelihood that, if we could only find the right way to say it, we’d win people over; I found that out with the pro-life issue. It’s the beliefs themselves that they reject, and changing the words won’t fool them.

Professor David Bradshaw, The Beauty of Chastity, a chapter in Healing Humanity

Words of the Year

For the first time in its history, the Oxford English Dictionary trusted the general public to vote on the word of the year instead of having its esteemed lexicographers make the choice.

Predictably, the general public immediately abused this trust by voting overwhelmingly for the slang term “goblin mode.”

The Morning Dispatch

… “goblin mode”. That means a state in which someone indulges their laziest or most self-indulgent habits—perhaps suitable as a symbol for the first proper post-lockdown year.

The Economist Daily Briefing for December 5

the stink of loserdom

The aura now surrounding Florida Man, per Ross Douthat

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.