Category: death

Snowed in

For the second time this late Autumn (remember: winter isn’t official until December 21, give or take a day according to some refinement that messes up my tidy grade-school precision), our Liturgy is cancelled because of hazardous travel conditions. Today, it’s sub-zero cold and winds whipping around perhaps seven inches of yesterday’s light powdery snow.

Learning to pray as we ought

No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.

Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.

I have doubtless been guilty of facile caricatures of evangelicalism. But what struck me when I first read Evangelical is Not Enough is that the evangelicalism in which Howard was raised was utterly sane and genuinely pious (it made my sane and pious childhood home look almost secular). Its fruit was not only Tom Howard, but his less-renowned sister, Elizabeth Elliot Leach.

Although I swam the Bosporus instead of the Tiber, I benefited greatly from his conclusion that even great Evangelical piety was not enough. The quote above is reflects just one of the glories of traditional Christian churches, and it’s one that I appreciated.

The inadequacies of Evangelicalism, combined with the compelling character of Jesus Christ and, these days, the shallowness of much Evangelicalism, is at the root of young people flooding into Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Music in the House of Love

Not all Evangelicalism (broadly construed) is as healthy as that of the Howard household:

My music phobia began when I first converted to Christianity in my early twenties. During that time, I came into contact with well-meaning but strict Pentecostals who tended to view secular music as spiritually dangerous. Though I’d grown up with parents who had the classic and independent rock stations on all day (even when we weren’t home), and though my happiest memory was seeing Counting Crows at Jones Beach Theater with my mom at eight years old, the Pentecostals’ caution rubbed off on me. And it rubbed off badly.

In an effort to purge my home of demons, I deleted all of my favorite music (to the extent that it’s possible to do so in our digital age). I burned all my musical biographies in the wood-burning stove, including my prized possession: A large gray book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics from 1962-85, complete with recreations of sketches and notes from his journal. I tore up my collections of Leonard Cohen lyrics, frantically praying, “Lord, is there anything he has written that pleases you?”

And I swear, when I flipped open the book, it opened to Cohen’s poem “Prayer for Messiah.” I wish I could say this small miracle kept me from burning the book, but it didn’t.
…

Emily Ruddy, Music in the House of Love

This kind of thing was part of the Bill Gothard cult, the nascent version of which my Evangelical high school foolishly allowed in. But it was not ubiquitous in the sort of Evangelicalism I experienced. I rejected Gothard’s view and any others like it.

Ruddy continues:

…
Several years into my conversion to Orthodoxy, after a long stretch of heartbreaking silence and bad Christian pop, I’ve fallen in love with music again, my music. I’ve replaced the Bob Dylan book with an identical copy I found on Poshmark. According to my Spotify Wrapped playlist, I’m actually in the top 0.001% of Dylan listeners worldwide. I’m not in the 0.001% of many things in life, so I’ll take what I can get.

My healing in this area corresponds to my entry into this ancient incarnational tradition. Orthodox Christians, for the most part, truly believe what they pray: That God is everywhere present and fills all things. They have a much healthier relationship with music, literature and culture than my Pentecostal companions did, which was a part of the draw. That, and the fact that the Orthodox sanctuary truly felt like a sanctuary. No yelling, no flailing, no smoke except incense smoke. Only worship.

Nicea and its Creed

This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, a milestone observed by churches, seminaries, and religious institutions but largely ignored by the secular press. Perhaps that is to be expected, since most readers who don’t know their homoousios (of same substance) from their homoiousios (of like substance) can hardly be expected to care about a few hundred bishops, priests, monks, and ascetics convened nearly two millennia ago in an Anatolian backwater. Sadly, that is the public’s loss. Whatever the intricacies of theology debated at Nicaea, this first of seven ecumenical councils did nothing less than create (or rather confirm) the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity.

Constantine, who had not yet converted to Christianity or declared it the official religion of his empire, convened the gathering to address the difficult questions raised by Arius concerning the nature of Christ’s divinity: namely, whether the Son of God was created by or coeternal with the Father. “The main imperial Churches in the Latin West and the Greek East, but also on the imperial frontier, all agreed on the outcome,” writes historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in his provocatively titled book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, “Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity.” 

That interpretation was more a confirmation than a conclusion, the purpose of the council having been to rectify the supposed errors of Arius and his considerable following who maintained that Christ, though divine, was still created by the Father …

…

High Church or low church, smells and bells or white-washed walls, Gregorian chants or praise bands, all orthodox believers affirm the words of that early credo. 

…

Although I am not attempting to write apologetics on behalf of those long-dead bishops or even some kind of “mere orthodoxy” for the millennial set, I would note that when it comes to the major controversies that preceded Nicaea, those who maintain that the heretical is always more radical, subversive, and ecstatic than orthodoxy are misinformed. In truth, the orthodox position was more at home with mystery and paradox than the interpretations or imaginings of erstwhile renegades.

…

[W]hen believers eschew the language of paradox, they display discomfort with the faith. A 2025 poll from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reports that only 16 percent of American Christians are Trinitarian, even though the vast majority are members of denominations that profess the Nicene Creed. On one hand, who can blame them? The Nicene Creed, and other statements of the early Church, are complicated, counterintuitive, baroque, and Byzantine (in both senses of that last word). Better to streamline it, clean it up, rationalize it, tame it.

Ed Simon, The Legacy of Nicaea.

Appreciative, I nevertheless beg to differ a bit. 28+ years ago, I thought I affirmed the Nicene Creed, without mental reservation, and as for the person of Jesus Christ, I probably did. But when it came to “… in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” I meant something other than what the 318 Holy Fathers assembled at Nicea had meant.

That was one of the two major epiphanies that shamed me out of the constellation of Protestant and Evangelical assemblies, who thought nothing of schism and who fancied the “one holy, catholic and apostolic Church” a ghostly, invisible, spiritual fellowship among all individuals who trusted Jesus properly, wheresoever they might be on Sunday morning.

(The other epiphany was that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, scripture alone, was a Pandora’s Box of mischief, schism and disunity.)

Averting our eyes

Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.

Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.

Martin Shaw

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Sundays are joyful days, but there’s a little cloud on this one: 26 years ago, my father died, quite unexpectedly.

His was a quick and apparently painless death — what we think of as a good death these days. But I’m not so sure. Meeting God face-to-face is a serious business. I’m inclined to think a slow and painful death, with lots of time to face the reality and to set aright things that are our of kilter, has its own advantages.

We brought nothing into this world

Modernity equates liberty with the freedom to decide and choose, to define ourselves and the world around us. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992):

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

We relish this concept of unfettered freedom. But, of course, it is absurd, even for a secularist. For whether we choose to admit it or not, we “brought nothing into this world” (1 Tim. 6:7). Everything in our lives is derived and gifted. We are not the inventors of the world nor of our lives. And though we struggle to understand and even master our own DNA, it remains a primary component of our destiny, a genetic memory of the history of our coming into being across the ages. To be told that we have some portion of DNA contributed by Neanderthals reminds us that even such obscure ancestors are “selves we have received” through our genetically traditioned existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

There has never been a “Positive World”

I was a casual follower of Aaron Renn until Alan Jacobs demolished Renn’s famous February 2022 piece, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.

Without defining Christianity, Renn says the world used to be positive toward it. You can read Renn for yourself, and Jacobs, too (and you really should read Jacobs if you think Renn is onto something important), but here’s the gist (via Jacobs) of why there was never a “positive world” for thoroughgoing Christianity:

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.” If you don’t believe me, try getting up on stage in an evangelical megachurch and reckoning seriously with Jesus’s teaching on wealth and poverty. Even a sermon on loving your enemies, like Ruby Bridges, and blessing those who curse you, can be a hard sell — as many pastors since 2016 have discovered. News flash: if you make a point of never saying anything that would make people doubt your commitment to their preferred social order, they’ll probably think you an upstanding citizen. (Who knew?)

There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt fully at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel. 

Renn is Evangelical or Evangelical-adjacent (PCA Presbyterian). I was once very friendly toward the PCA, so I think I can say that it’s not a church that rocked the social order (at least until Orgasms for All! became the unofficially established religion of the USA).

The bloom is entirely off my Renn Rose. I deeply discount articles that take his “three worlds” model as their premise.

A Christian Is An Outlaw

Apropos of “negative world”:

It would be honour in modernity for a Christian to be called such an outlaw, for surely they do not conform to the laws of this world.

Martin Shaw, A Christian Is An Outlaw

God in a box

There’s a brilliant episode of King of the Hill where Bobby, the thirteen-year-old boy, gets really into Christian rock. At the end of the episode his dad, Hank, shows him a box where he keeps tokens from all the different phases he has gone through. There’s a Beanie Baby, a Tamagotchi, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle… Bobby cringes—and that’s the point. “I know you think the stuff you’re doing now is cool,” says Hank to his son, “but in a few years, you’re going to think it’s lame. And I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.”

Theophan Davis, How Not to Be a Saint

This Orthodox novice’s section on prayer (“Play to your weakness”) was also very good.

Sufficiently Rawlsian?

I might appeal to the second chapter of Genesis when speaking about the fundamental importance of male–female complementarity. But I do so because the biblical witness so succinctly and powerful states a fundamental truth that every civilization has honored.

R. R. Reno, responding to a transcribed speech of Oren Cass on how to construct a secular conservatism.

Would John Rawls accept this as public reasoning?

Sola Scriptura

Even as they claimed to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify what they took the Bible to mean. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants hoped. At the very least, it shows the inescapability of tradition. American Protestants never read, or argued over, the Bible alone.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

What the heck is a Carpatho-Rusyn?

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Byzantine Rite Christians from the Carpathian mountain region began to arrive in America. It is difficult to label these people: they came from an area that today is divided among Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine, and they were known by a great variety of names, including Carpatho-Russians, Rusyns, Ruthenians, Galicians, and others. Their ancestors were originally Orthodox Christians, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they submitted to the pope of Rome through a series of “unions,” which is why they have long been known to the Orthodox as “Uniates.” Despite their subordination to the pope, they retained most of the external forms of Orthodox worship and practice, including allowing married men to become priests.

Matthew Namee, Lost Histories.

These people are the historic core of my diocese. And my parish’s Patron Saint, Alexis Toth, led multitudes back to the Orthodox faith, after he was spurned by Archbishop John Ireland.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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.

Saturday 5-18-24

Single Father repatriates

For several years, I’ve been reading the blog of Hal Freeman, an American who was living in Russia with his younger Russian wife and their children.

But then his wife, Oksana, died, leaving him a single father in a land whose language he hadn’t mastered. His lack of mastery made daily life difficult, and to an extent left him at the mercy of his late wife’s family. And with them, the clash of cultures, American versus Russian, became a big problem.

So he and his youngest daughter returned to the U.S., leaving some sons in Russia. After a month or so of visiting his U.S. sons from a prior marriage, he posted again, including this touching passage:

It has been very hard moving without a wife. I am not just talking about the help in getting things packed and unpacked. It is hard not having someone so close with whom I can discuss what is going on and what we are going through. I have appealed more than once to C.S. Lewis’ book, “A Grief Observed,” and the analogy he used of a man who had a leg amputated. At first the pain can be sharp and overwhelming when touched. Over time, there is healing. The sharp pain and the extreme sensitivity fades. He learns to get around much easier over time. Nevertheless, when he gets into a car or the bath, he remembers that he is an amputee. 

It has been well over two and a half years since Oksana departed this life. I don’t have those times of sharp, excruciating pain in my soul anymore. I have learned to move on and accept that I am a single father. Yet, the move has made the memory of her departure more difficult again. And, I am facing the reality that at my age and with my rather different circumstances, I probably will never have the joy and contentment of a life companion again. And I can honestly say–and I believe I speak for many others who have lost their spouse–it really isn’t so much about missing what she could do for me. I miss doing things for her. There is great emotional reward in caring for and doing things for the one you love. As someone else who had gone through the grief said to me, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go.”

Life Begins Again in America

Barring simultaneous death in an accident or something, my wife and I face that prospect sooner rather than later, both of us having attained our allotted threescore and ten. She, having kept up roughly four close friendships, probably would cope better than I would.

Transing the gay away

At the risk of being accused of concern-trolling, I’m passing this along because it really does bother me.

[T]he entire category of gay kids has been abolished by, yes, gay groups. Gay kids are now conflated with entirely different groups: children who believe they are the opposite sex, straight kids who call themselves “queer,” an entirely new category of human beings called “nonbinaries,” and a few hundred new “orientations” and “genders” — including eunuchs! All of these kids are now deemed “gender diverse,” essentially living the same “LGBTQIA+” life, defined as being queer and subverting any and all cultural and social norms. Homosexuality? It has effectively evaporated into “gender diversity.”

…

The last thing a gay boy needs to be told is that he might actually be a girl inside — and that might be the source of all his troubles. It’s psychologically brutalizing and scarring.

… It’s the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys. And it is now being deployed by gender theorists as gleefully as it once was by bigots.

… The overwhelming majority of detransitioners are gay men and lesbians who were persuaded they were trans in childhood. In the old days, sorting through these feelings just required growing up — no need to make a decision until you’re an adult — and every decision was reversible. In the age of “affirmation-only” and “gender-affirming care,” all this becomes ever more fraught as kids are required to make a decision against a pubertal clock. And this is not a hypothetical. We know it has happened; we know it is happening. For many gender-dysphoric children, there is no doubt that “gender-affirming care” is literally transing the gay away.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added).

What greater manifestation of “internalized homophobia” could there be than deciding that my attraction toward boys must mean I’m a girl (or vice-versa)? Yet, valorizing this madness has become “progressive” dogma.

Presidential “debates”

The first televised presidential debates were between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. The contrast between them and the last debates between Trump and Biden is striking—and appalling. The 1960 candidates soberly aired their views on issues of the day, differing with one another firmly but in a civil manner. The events were reasoned, mature, and valuable. There were reasons Nixon’s sobriquet was “Tricky Dick” and they were widely known. But on camera in those debates he, from today’s vantage-point, seems almost professorial, measuring his words and tackling serious issues.

Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.

This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive … To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality … Trump’s verbal towel-snapping is extreme—he is now renowned for the ability to entrance an audience while communicating all but nothing of importance.

John McWhorter

I not infrequently post provocative things I may not agree with. This is not one of those posts. There are other ways Biden could have declined “debate” (e.g., “I will not debase the office of the Presidency by engaging with a man under 91 criminal indictments”), but he’s made that harder by getting his Irish up and smack-talking Trump.

Body-snatched?

It seems that the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew and upside-down American flag for as many as several days shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Justice Alito attributes that to his wife’s response to a pissing contest with progressive neighbors.

Nick Cattogio isn’t unequivocally buying that explanation. After a trip into the weeds, he ascends to a higher-level overview:

Our friend David French reminded his readers today of one of Jonah Goldberg’s most famous columns, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers piece from March 2016. It was written just as Trump was locking up the Republican presidential nomination for the first time. The influence of ascendant MAGA populism on conservatives whom he’d known for years wasn’t merely profound, Jonah wrote. It was eerie.

He described the change his way: “Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew … Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to.”

That was eight years ago. By now, every person reading this has had extensive personal experience with the phenomenon he observed. It’s happened again and again, in plain sight.

That experience is inescapable context for the reaction to the Times’ story. Maybe the Alitos are getting a bad rap about the flag. Maybe the justice is prepared to thwart Trump’s unconstitutional ambitions in a second term.

Or maybe another body is on its way to being snatched. Why should the Supreme Court be immune from to an ideological virus that’s convinced right-wingers that vindicating America’s constitutional vision requires empowering Donald Trump?

Until the body-snatcher era ends, no one who shows evidence of having been snatched gets the benefit of the doubt. Not at the bottom of the conservative movement and not at the top either.

Culture war debt forgiveness

You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites. They don’t.

National Review, The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

When theology fails

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me. That may be one great part of what I fear, now that I think of it.

Marilynne Robinson (one of her Gilead novels)

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.

Friday, 5-17-24

Pearl-clutchers

“I have heard from a good number of people in the S.D.N.Y. who have said, ‘Why the heck would Todd [Blanche] do this — why would he ever take this case?’” Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst who worked with Mr. Blanche at the Southern District of New York, said in a recent profile. “My response is, generally, when did we become pearl-clutchers about defense lawyers defending defendants?”

Michael Wilson, Todd Blanche, Trump’s Lawyer in Hush-Money Trial, Cross-Examines Cohen

Just so.

The Culture Generally

Seeing whole people

[W]e have to stop just seeing these [gender dysphoric] young people through the lens of their gender and see them as whole people, and address the much broader range of challenges that they have, sometimes with their mental health, sometimes with undiagnosed neurodiversity. It’s really about helping them to thrive, not just saying “How do we address the gender?” in isolation.

Dr. Hilary Cass to the New York Times

Thinking small

Ted Gioia, Why Creatives Will Win by Thinking Small pulls together a convincing case that “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers” and are going independent and/or small to evade them. Taylor Swift and Substack are two examples, evading the gatekeepers of the sclerotic music and publishing industries respectively.

Maybe we could say that small is getting pretty big.

Ted Gioia’s got one of the best culture-analyzing Substacks going.

Living off inherited moral capital

“I wouldn’t call it a change of mind,” Will said of his transition from classical liberalism to traditionalist conservatism. “I would say that I had become much more sensitive to the problem that Gertrude Himmelfarb, her husband, Irving Kristol, and others were to cite. And that is: Does classic liberalism provide for its own continuation, or does it live off the moral capital of a different age?”

Guy Denton, George Will Stands Against Vehemence

Presented without comment

A female friend expressed outrage that Caitlin Clark would be paid a piddling $76,000 in her first year in the WNBA. (By comparison, the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft signed a four-year contract for $55 million.) I asked her what team drafted Clark. She did not know. I asked her whether she knew the name of New York’s WNBA team. She did not. The name of any team in the WNBA? Nope. A famous player in the WNBA? Again, no answer.

R. R. Reno

Ready, fire, aim

Staff at The New York Times are circulating a draft of a letter to their boss, executive editor Joe Kahn, criticizing him for saying that some young reporters are not fully committed to independent journalism. Pro tip: if you’re worried your boss thinks you’re all whiny activists, campaigning against him from within the newsroom is only proving his point. (Semafor)

Oliver Wiseman

Politics

Boondogglia, USA

[A]rena subsidies are a terrible use of finite government resources and a ridiculously egregious redistribution of wealth from regular Americans—fans and haters alike—to some of the wealthiest people and organizations on the planet. And, to top it all off, they’re a classic case of political malpractice—local officials delivering massive rents to various cronies by promising unwitting voters the world yet delivering far fewer—but still “seen”—economic and social benefits to their communities.

…

Maybe all this government support might be worth the costs if the subsidized facilities at issue produced even a fraction of the benefits that supporters promise, but they don’t. Instead, there are few positions on which more economists agree than the terribleness of sports arena subsidies.

Scott Lincicome, Sports Are Great, but Stadium Subsidies Stink

Election 2024

The default position of American conservative Christians in this Fall’s Presidential Election should be to abstain or to vote for a Third-Party Candidate. Neither major party candidate is acceptable, so we should avoid complicity with both. It’s a painful situation, but not complicated.

My unspoken premise is that America is, and long has been, off course, and like all empires is waning, slowly, then all at once. (I could be wrong about the all-at-once part; that may come from the part of Evangelical apocalypticism that I did not avoid and have not fully recovered from. “Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen” and all that.)

Neither major party has what it takes to fix that. Maybe no party does. Still, I intend to vote for Peter Sonski for President. That’s not just a protest vote. My values line up better with the American Solidarity Party than with either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Am I throwing my vote away? No. I’m telling both parties that they’re unacceptable. That’s a message well worth sending, not a waste. If enough people tell them that, they’ll change or fade into irrelevance. The first step toward changing our unsatisfactory two-party system, if it’s not entirely incorrigible, is to stop voting for lesser evils.

Am I voting for the other guy by not voting for your guy? No. I know how my home state is going to vote; my vote won’t be decisive — not in 2024, anyway. If polling was close enough that I thought it might make a difference, my correct decision would admittedly be harder emotionally. (I last voted for a “lesser evil” in, I believe, 2008.)

That’s it.

POTUS 2024

It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.

Dee, a friend of Peggy Noonan, explaining why she’s voting for Trump.

Polls suggest that a felony conviction would lose him some votes ….

David Graham. What kind of world are we living in that a felony conviction wouldn’t be the death of a campaign?

Liberalism versus authoritarianism

I’ve tried to understand the appeal of Donald Trump. David Brooks gives it an oblique stab, and I thought there was a lot to like in his analysis, which is about liberalism versus authoritarianism, and the draw of the latter.

Now I understand how we keep electing bozos

As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.

Wall Street Journal.

Might there be, among those misinformed folks, people who give Biden credit for Dobbs as well as those who blame him? Or is ignorance a “pro-choice” exclusive?

Female success in Trumplandia

  • In The Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian noted that Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sarah Palin, among others, conform to a certain MAGA model for women leaders: “First, they want to prove how tough they are by shooting guns, preferably at animals, though occasionally at cars that Democrats drive. And second, they aspire to beauty standards set by Fox News anchors. Dental veneers. Cheek and lip fillers. Botox. Hair extensions. Performative cruelty and pouty lips are what it takes to succeed as a woman in the party of Trump.” (Judy Moise, Seattle)
  • In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley appraised a recent Rolling Stones concert and wrote that Mick Jagger’s physicality “invites you to imagine Mikhail Baryshnikov raised by a family of overcaffeinated roosters.” (Paul Welch, Phoenix, and Dan Olson, Spokane, Wash., among others)

Frank Bruni

How MAGAworld grew

Of all passions the passion for the Inner [Circle] is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I have watched this play out powerfully since 2016.

De-polarizing maxims to live by

  • The people you think of as your enemies aren’t as wicked as you believe them to be.
  • If you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do heretical religion.

Putting things in perspective

  • In a gloomy mood about the state of the world, I was reminded that the big actors of today, Trump, Biden, Putin, etc. etc. will mostly be dead, and very soon. Thinking in terms of living so that our communities outlast the current commotions is important.
  • Leonard Woolf: “One of the most horrible things … was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler — the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. … One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers. … Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’”

John Brady and Jim Rain, respectively, on the best social medium in the cosmos.

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.

Monday, 11/6/23

Will you live?

[A]ll death is certain. We don’t get to choose whether we live or die. We only get to choose if we live before we die.

Konstantin Kisin

New York

  • In Grub Street, Mark Byrne took issue with a friend’s comment that the Greenwich Village restaurant Cafe Cluny is “too expensive for what it is.” “This is Manhattan: ‘Too expensive for what it is’ is written in rat’s blood on the stoops of our walk-ups,” he riffed.

Frank Bruni

Revolution

Revolutionaries ask Americans to do not simply what is bad but also what is impossible. To a revolutionary who believes in racial immanence, only a reinvention of America as we know it would suffice. Yet even then, racial immanence presents further obstacles. Any revolution would, in time, prove insufficiently revolutionary. Such is the nature of maximalist thinking. After all, the white people remaining in the theoretical new nation would have been socialized by the ancient regime into white supremacy and conditioned to uphold it at all costs. What do we do about them? There is no end to the matter—at least not one that anyone cares to identify.

Tal Fortgang, The Incrementalists and the Revolutionaries

Lighting lanterns

That’s the best we can do in life — be truthful and hope those truths become lanterns for others as they wander through the dark.

Patty Davis, paying tribute to Matthew Perry’s candor about addiction, via Frank Bruni

In a lot of ways, my blogging is striving toward such lantern-lighting — posting provocative thoughts about questions to which I may have no answers. It may be untrue that “together we can do anything,” but I believe that we can do more together than we do fussin’ and fightin’ with one another.

How to fight The Machine

How to fight back? Religion is one way. Have a family at a young age instead of wasting your life buying crap on Amazon. Become a carpenter or a welder. Keep bees.

David Samuels, Year Zero: The Age of the Machines Demands Its Own Samizdat

Heroes in their own little minds

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now

Shorts

  • Israel omitted from online maps in China amid war on Hamas in Gaza
  • A professor at an esteemed college mentioned this week that when he likened the airport mob in Dagestan to a “pogrom,” not one of his students knew what the word meant. (Peggy Noonan, hyperlink added)
  • Here is a truth: Anything good for cable news is bad for humanity. (Peggy Noonan)
  • No man will give his life for a question mark; he will for an exclamation point! (Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who attributed it to John Paul II via Cardinal Edwin O’Brien. All this via Raymond de Souza)
  • There’s a certain amount of chutzpah among Democrats to assume that it’s only the other side pursuing a culture war. (Ruy Teixeira)
  • Nobody ever quite knew what to make of [Edward] Abbey, which is a status we should all aspire to. (Paul Kingsnorth)
  • Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth. (George Packer in 2020)

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.

Happy August

Culture

Frodo failed

Frodo failed.

If you’re a reader of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (or just a movie-goer), then you know that the central, heroic character, the young Mr. Frodo, ring-bearer, fails to throw the Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom at the end of his arduous journey. Everything he loved, his home, his friends, every scrap of goodness, depended on the Ring being tossed into those fires, and, when it came down to it, he was unable to let it go. Fortunately for Middle Earth, the wraith-like, pitiable creature, Gollum, bit Frodo’s finger off in order to have the Ring again for his own, and accidentally slipped and fell into the fires, saving Middle Earth in the bargain. All of that drama resolved by an accident?

It is genius.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Pedagogy after AI

Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”

If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.

If you take up this challenge you will learn not to “think for yourself” but to think in the company of well-chosen companions, and not to have your thoughts dictated to you by the transnational entity some call surveillance capitalism, which sees you as a resource to exploit and could care less if your personal integrity and independence are destroyed. The technocratic world to which I would be handing you over, if I were to encourage the use of ChatGPT, is driven by the “occupational psychosis” of sociopathy. And I don’t want you to be owned and operated by those Powers. 

Alan Jacobs, Technologies and Trust

Stripping humanity from homo sapiens

If out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, then if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.

L.M. Sacasas, Embrace Your Crookedness. This is a very worthwhile reflection on the human condition.

Don’t assume that “they” will be stripping humanity. Some people strip their own humanity. Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) embeds the story of one who did so:

So with his money he could follow his mania, which was for the new thing, for Science, for the machine, for the artificial, the modern. You may not remember it, for I think it came earlier with you than with us, but there was some time ago a rage for such things. It was partly due to your H. G. Wells and his imitators, and it was partly due to our ideas about America, which we then believed to be entirely covered with sky-scrapers and factories.

…

I went on so, telling more and more absurd stories, until I said, “And of course I was forgetting, there is the artificial woman that was invented by the celebrated surgeon Dr. Martel. That is quite wonderful.” And my old friend said to me, “An artificial woman? What is that? A woman that is artificial! For God’s sake! Tell us all about it!”

…

I saw that she was getting very fond of me, like a mother for her son, and I grieved, for I did not like to have brought this sorrow to her by [the silly joke on her husband about the artificial woman]. I felt very ashamed when she came to see me at a time when the cold wind had made me bad with my lungs, and it was as if I should go like my sister, who had died when she was sixteen, and I said to her, “Aunt, you are too good to me. I have done nothing for you,” and she answered with tears in her eyes, “But you have been as good to me as a son. Do you think I am so simple that I do not know the artificial woman must long ago be finished, with such a clever man as you say working on it? You tell my husband that it is not so only because you know that I could not bear to have such a creature in my house.” There was nothing at all that I could say. I could not confess to her that I had been a monkey without making it plain to her that her husband had been an ass.

…

It came to this poor silly old man and he learned that the most modern thing to do was to kill yourself, and so he did it. He became very melancholy for a time, working at it as other old men work at learning chess, and then went into his stable and hanged himself, to be modern, to have an artificial death instead of a natural. I think he was probably sure that there was immortality, for though he believed he was a freethinker I do not believe it ever crossed his mind that he would not live after death. And soon after his wife also hanged herself, but I do not think there was anything modern about her reasons, they could not have been more ancient.

Whence our delight at athletes?

Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

Hectoring, dismissive and jejune

[I]f the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be. … To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

Christine Emba via DenseDiscovery

Notable passing

SunRay Kelley, Master Builder of the Counterculture, Dies at 71. That link should get you through the Times paywall.

Sinead O’Connor

My cyberfriend Patrick Rhone shares a worthy comment on Sinead O’Connor: some Kris Kristofersson song lyrics in her honor after she was booed off a stage.

Musicians are sometimes prophets, and prophets often get stoned.

Political

Muslim discomfort with Democrat extremists

Asma Uddin, in her book “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” describes “a tacit agreement that Muslims, as religious believers, will never challenge any of the rights championed by the Left, such as a progressive vision of gender or sexual equality.” Muslims became an integral part of the party not as a faith community with distinct theological commitments but as a “marginalized” group requiring protection from Republican bigotry.

…

But during the Trump years, the Democratic Party veered sharply to the left on social and cultural issues. The Republican Party lost interest in Muslims, with Mr. Trump neglecting to antagonize them during his 2020 re-election bid. The new enemy was “wokeness,” and a growing number of Muslims found themselves on the GOP side of that divide. According to the AP VoteCast Survey, as many as 35% of Muslims voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, compared with 8% to 13% in 2016.

…

It’s easy enough for the left to dismiss white evangelical Trump supporters. But when the party does the same to Muslims, who for years had been loyal Democrats, it demonstrates its disrespect for actual cultural diversity.

Shadi Hamid, Muslims vs. Democrats: A Story of Betrayal

Conservatives and Reactionaries

When writers at The Bulwark or The Dispatch, or the presidential campaigns of Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, and Will Hurd, criticize Trump, they highlight (at least in part) his breaks from longstanding norms, traditions, and expectations of elected officials. Trump shouldn’t have lied about the results of the 2020 election. He shouldn’t have provoked an insurrection and haplessly sought to foment a self-coup to remain in power after losing the vote. He shouldn’t have disregarded laws restricting access to classified documents. And so forth. Those are the kinds of objections one would expect to hear from conservatives.

But DeSantis has nothing critical to say about any of the above. When he goes after Trump, it’s for his failure to break more radically from longstanding norms, traditions, and expectation. Trump was too willing to defer to public-health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, too quick to believe vaccines could protect people from becoming ill, too inclined to seek support from LGBT voters, too moderate on abortion, too cautious in dealing with the administrative state. In all of these ways, Trump was too conservative. He maintained too many continuities with the past. He should have broken more fully with it in favor of an alternative future that would be more congenial to the right.

Damon Linker, Ron DeSantis, Reactionary Tryhard.

I don’t want Joe Biden to be President for four more years. I’d gladly vote for most conservative alternatives to him — if there were any. Trump is a reactionary and populist (as well as a narcissist and/or a fine illustration of “oppositional defiant disorder”); DeSantis is trying to outdo him on both counts. And I don’t intend to pull punches about that sad reality.

“Spreading democracy”

My nation pretends it’s spreading democracy, and I’ve never (within ready memory) believed that.

Democratization conflicts with Westernization, and democracy is inherently a parochializing not a cosmopolitanizing process. Politicians in non-Western societies do not win elections by demonstrating how Western they are. Electoral competition instead stimulates them to fashion what they believe will be the most popular appeals, and those are usually ethnic, nationalist, and religious in character.

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

Barbarian feigns Christianity

On twitter Stephen Wolfe, author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” claimed he didn’t know who Emmett Till was until he recently googled his name. He then commented: “Yea I’m supposed to care about some 1955 event that all the libs care about. Their minds are captured.”

…

Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism extolls a fantasy Calvinist confessional state in which the elect rule over the lost and reprobate. God’s reputed people have the power, and the people less favored are their subjects, living under their rules. Its vision of power over service isn’t very Christian. And its subjugation of some people over others based on their religion isn’t very nationalist. It certainly isn’t at all American.

But disdaining Emmett Till’s murder, and the civil rights revolution it helped unleash, as part of the wider ongoing, 2000-year-old Christian revolution of equality and dignity for all, is helpfully clarifying.

Mark Tooley

I can’t think of anyone I consider actually Christian who advocates “Christian Nationalism.” Maybe I need to get out more. Maybe some Christians involuntarily drawn to the notion have conscience-pangs and reservations so they don’t talk about it.

One of the reasons why I oppose “Christian Nationalism” in the USA is that notionally-Christian barbarians would almost certainly grab the reins of power, and there’s nobody more remorseless than someone who thinks he has a mandate from heaven to rule righteously.

Tough love

Congratulations to Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who over the weekend set a standard for good governance to which political leaders throughout the Americas can aspire.
“I wish him luck and strength,” he tweeted after his son Nicolás was hit with charges related to money laundering and drug trafficking. “May these events strengthen his character and let him reflect on his own errors.”

TMD

Public transportation is a loser?

The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don’t charge fares, suddenly it can’t ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.
@dx@social.ridetrans.it

Via DenseDiscovery. I confess that I had to read that twice to see the brilliance.

Unwelcome contrast

I myself am a secret monarchist, as were my relatives in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1775 except they weren’t secret about it. I miss Elizabeth II, the perfect modest model of a modern English monarch, tramping in the rain with her corgis. When Her Majesty met President Schlump and he opened his big yap and hee-hawed at her, we saw a contrast that was not favorable to our side.

Garrison Keillor

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.

The Best, 1/27/23

Culture

Transhumanism

I find transhumanism repugnant, and I believe in the wisdom of repugnance because I believe that some truths are not susceptible of distillation to catchy slogans for the ADHD World we live in, and perhaps not possible to articulate directly at all.

But I was unaware that there was more to it than billionaire nerds asking “wouldn’t it be cool if we could upload our brains and live forever?” No, there’s another case, superficially more plausible:

If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature.

But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming and fire. Such a view forms the basis of antihumanism, a system of thought that removes humans from their pedestal and contends that, given our penchant for destruction—not only of ourselves but also all other species—we are less deserving of existence than are animals, plants, rocks, water, or air. For antihumanists, the only way off the precipice is a fall, with the survivors left to pick up the pieces. And if there are no survivors, that wouldn’t be a tragedy; there will always be beings in the world, even if there are no human beings.

Australian philosopher Toby Ord uses the image of the crumbling ledge in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). “Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves,” Ord writes. He believes that the odds of this happening in the next 100 years are about one in six, the same as in a game of Russian roulette. “Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover,” he concludes.

Ord is not an antihumanist but rather a transhumanist, a research fellow at the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which looks to scientific and technological advances as the only path forward. Transhumanists agree with antihumanists that human nature is morally and physically circumscribed in ways that make it impossible for us to get past the precipice. They likewise agree that Homo sapiens is doomed to disappear. But for transhumanists, this is a wonderful prospect because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling. As Ord writes, “Rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” That something will no longer be “us” in the strictest sense, but our posthuman successors will preserve what is best and most important about us. “I love humanity, not because we are Homo sapiens, but because of our capacity to flourish,” Ord writes.

Adam Kirsch, The End Is Only the Beginning (The American Scholar)

The appeal of that comes from its familiarity: We’ve been making problems with technology, then solving them with more technology, for a fairly long time now. Unless you stop to think about it, that seems normal.

(H/T Alan Jacobs)

Humanity without limits seems at best inhumane to me. Nonetheless, I recommend the American Scholar article, which pairs well with C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

White nationalism

The constant accusations of “white nationalism” remind me of preachers and other polemicists calling Playboy “hard-core pornography” 50 years or so ago. People are going to catch on fairly quickly when they see something white nationalist/hard-core and there’s no term left on the rhetorical spectrum to describe it.

Haute Couture

I don’t recall ever seeing a piece of haute couture that so vividly captures the intersection of aburdity and misogyny:

(H/T the Atlantic)Legal

Legalia – Brett Kavanaugh

Perhaps because of some new movie or something, Justice Brett Kavanaugh seems to be back in the news, and it set me thinking about his confirmation hearings again.

When I was becoming a lawyer, I had to sit for a personal interview with another lawyer (or two). One of the questions was “Have you ever broken the law?” My answer was that, starting around age 19, I had two alcoholic beverages, one on each of two occasions, contrary to law. He/They were amused at my candor.

Back to Justice Kavanaugh: the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness, beginning in high school and continuing, apparently, nonstop to present. I supported him before I knew of this, waffling afterward (I’m a bad member of any tribe).

I expect greater respect for the law from highly-placed Judges. I am obviously not squeaky-clean in the underage drinking department, but I’m close, I admit that I broke the law, and I admit that I was wrong. Kavanaugh lied and tap-danced about his drinking.

“But are you serious that ‘the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness’? Two women accused him of sexual assaults!”

Yes, I am serious. I was not convinced by those two female accusers. But the history of drinking made both charges more plausible than they would have been without that history. Drunken sexual encounters, voluntary, involuntary and borderline, are the bane of every major university, and both accusations fit fairly well into the “drunken frat boy/drink until you’re irresistible” pattern.

Had I been a Senator, I think I’d have voted to reject the nomination, not because I found those accusations likelier true than not, but because I don’t want an unrepentant, somewhat sanctimonious, drunk on the Supreme Court — a man against whom the accusations had some sting.

Politics

Red-pilling for power

Damon Linker does a pretty good job in The Red-Pill Pusher of explaining and rebutting Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” (Linker’s term, but I doubt Yarvin would reject it), of whom I had heard, and probably could have placed as Right rather than Left figure. Beyond that, I was essentially ignorant of Yarvin’s particular spin on things — or how much influence it has built in formerly-reputable conservative circles like Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy marked him as someone with a background and a mind possibly suited to high office.

Yarvin gets a lot of facts right, a few more plausible. Yet my reaction against his conclusions is different than what Linker articulated (which probably was less than what he could have articulated).

Here’s my problem with Yarvin. He is hungry for power, and his obsession with power has already corrupted him. He has made it clear that among his first exercises of power would be sweeping, radical firings that would cripple government (and cause much misery to the newly-unemployed). Then he and his mostly-unnamed pals would amateurishly assume most or all of the vacated offices and try to impose their will on a country that’s about 50% of a different mind. It would make the Trump years a model of decorum and competence in comparison. I think it highly likely that there would be much bloodshed.

I have no reason to trust that their program would make the country better or make its citizens freer.

No thanks.

Signs of hope

I recently (like within the past half hour as I type) heard a preacher say that he has only seen one encouraging sign in public so far this year: a bunch of NFL players kneeling and praying around a teammate felled on the field by a heart attack.

It’s a tempting narrative: world; hell; handbasket. You can fill in the blanks.

Yet I see other signs — contemporaneous if not distinctly 2023.

  1. I found it encouraging that a high proportion of the worst emerging Republican jackasses were handed their heads by voters last November.
  2. I find it encouraging that honest liberals, and even one Marxist, keep saying things that get them labeled — oh, I don’t know; “white nationalists,” probably. Examples here and here.
  3. I find it almost as encouraging that most honest conservatives have no use for Donald Trump and say to in terms that gives aid and comfort to liberals. (A bold claim I know, but I can always fall back on the No True Scotsman fallacy if you find a counter-example.)
  4. Indeed, I find it encouraging to be reminded that center-left and center-right have an awful lot in common when compared to the alternatives.

The Quaker’s Mule Who Wouldn’t Plow

One of my favorite stories is about the Quaker whose mule refused to plow.

The Quaker tried to coax him every way he knew. Finally, he stepped around in front of the mule, took him gently by the ears, and stared into his eyes.

“Brother mule, thou knowest that I am a Quaker. Thou knowest I cannot beat thee. Thou knowest I cannot curse thee.

“With thou knowest not is is that I can sell thee to the Baptist down the road, and he can beat the living daylights out of thee.” 

Mitch Daniels, though Presbyterian rather than Quaker, ran no negative ads in his two successful runs for governor of Indiana, yet he won re-election in a year when Barack Obama memorably took Indiana’s electors in the presidential race. As President of Purdue (recently retired), he froze tuition for ten years.

It does my soul good cheers my sinful heart, then, to see that Mitch has supporters who are willing to respond to barbarians who are trying to keep him from running for the Senate seat Mike Braun will vacate next year to run for governor:

Then with a toxic blast of political rectal gas, [Representative Jim] Banks signaled he would enter the brewing 2024 U.S. Senate race. Teaming up with Club for Growth President David McIntosh, the pair did something we’ve never seen before: Running a preemptive TV ad designed to keep a rival — Mitch Daniels — out of the race.

… [I]n the eyes of Club for Growth, a PAC of billionaires, it said in the TV ad, “After 50 years in big government, big pharma and big academia, Mitch Daniels forgot how to fight. An old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”

Long-time GOP operative Mark Lubbers responded to the Club for Growth TV ad, telling me, “These are the same people who cost us Republican control of the Senate. Sad to see that Banks has thrown in with them.”

… 

Donald J. Trump Jr. then tweeted on Jan. 13: “The establishment is trying to recruit weak RINO Mitch Daniels to run for U.S. Senate in Indiana. The same Mitch Daniels who agreed with Joe Biden that millions of MAGA Republicans are supposedly a danger to the country & trying to ‘subvert democracy.’ He would be Mitt Romney 2.0.”

This was the first time anyone had described Daniels as a “weak RINO.”

Lubbers responded to Trump the younger: “You think the progressive left needs to be fought; we think it needs to be BEATEN. That requires optimistic positive conservatism that builds majorities, wins elections & makes policy. Not just foaming at the mouth, counting tweets, and grifting contributions. Hit the road.”

(Brian Howey)

Thank you, Mark Lubbers. And I’m very disappointed with David McIntosh — though it’s possible that he’s who he always was but I’ve changed.

Freddie clears the bases

Freddie deBoer hits a grand-slam homerun. Excerpts:

When you think politically, … think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next proposed political action hurt Rich Uncle Pennybags? … I am saying that a left-wing movement that devotes most of its time, effort, and attention to actions that fail the test risks no longer being a left-wing movement at all. I’m saying that a left wing that constantly fails the Rich Uncle Pennybags test is precisely the kind of left-wing movement that establishment power would prefer to face – a movement about symbolism over substance, about the individual rather than the masses, about elevating minorities in the ranks of a corrupt system rather than ending that corruption, about personal antipathy rather than structural reality.

…

[P]olitics is about mass action at scale, and the ability of politics properly understood to address interpersonal bigotries is limited. What’s not limited is our ability to reduce economic and social inequalities between identity groups, if we engage in politics in the right spirit and with a healthy understanding of the need to achieve structural change instead of personal critique – the kind of structural change that Rich Uncle Pennybags can’t ignore.

That’s a really good understanding of politics, even if you’re on Uncle Pennybag’s side. But the best parts were (1) examples of pseudo-progressive obsessions that fail the test and may even strengthen Uncle Moneybags, and (2) things I read between the lines.

F’rinstance, Uncle Moneybags doesn’t mind DEI training. It may even help him. He probably doesn’t mind the rich kids of Antifa.

And just as the Right is full of people whose whole purpose in public life seems to be trolling and triggering the Left, so the Left is full of people whose whole purpose in public life, objectively, seems to be trolling and triggering the Right. They fail the Uncle Moneybags test and, along with their equally self-indulgent Right-wing co-conspirators, debase our visible political discourse and waste time that could be spent on consequential, not clickworthy, things.

A Pleasant Surprise

The Justice Department announced Tuesday two Florida residents had been indicted for allegedly vandalizing at least three pro-life pregnancy centers in Florida, spray-painting threats like “if abortions aren’t safe than niether [sic] are you,” “WE’RE COMING for U,” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” on the sides of the buildings. If convicted of the charges—which also included violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—each defendant could face a maximum of 12 years in prison and fines up to $350,000. A number of crisis pregnancy centers around the country faced threats or violent attacks in the months leading up to and following last year’s Dobbs decision.

The Morning Dispatch

If forced to wager, I’d have wagered that Biden’s DOJ would never ferret out and prosecute the perpetrators of any attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers. Since I didn’t wager, I’m pleased to have my mild bias disproven.

Nonconformists

Transgender woman with Mike Tyson face tattoo GUILTY of raping two vulnerable mums with “her penis”

Most of the press went along with the defendant’s post-arrest change from man to woman, as did the judge, calling him “she” throughout the trial.” The Sun, god bless ‘em, did not.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.

Public Affairs, 11/19/22

I’ve been on a bit of a roll lately, blogging daily. That’s not a goal, but I’ve just stumbled into it.

I’m going to try to separate any blogging about Florida Man into separate posts. If we are lucky, he’ll continue fading from memory and relevance anyway. Today is not a day when I write about him.

My (Other) Man Mitch

I’ve long been an admirer of outgoing Purdue President Mitch Daniels, who adopted Dubya’s praise of “my man Mitch” and made it his own when he ran for Governor of Indiana.

But I also respect the heck out of Mitch McConnell, and am pleased that Senate Republicans spared no time re-electing him as their leader over a Trumpier challenger.

McConnell is shrewd, stable, and flexible. He cooperated with Trump a lot without becoming a sycophant. He also criticized Trump without becoming an unhinged never-Trumper, and that even in the face of Trump’s racist attacks on his asian wife. He carefully assesses electability when parsing out dollars to candidates from funds he effectively controls, and I have little doubt that the Republicans would have a majority in the Senate come January if primary voters had picked his preferred candidates over Trump’s parade of grotesques.

In other words, he’s a grown-up in a city of petulant, limelight-seeking adolescent Republicans and soccer-flopping progressives.

Democrats like to demonize McConnell as Republicans demonize Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, but we’d put an end to the “do-nothing Congress” if we had more Senators and Representatives of his temperament and experience.

What does he know, anyway?

Reacting to an uncommonly silly pronouncement from Peter Thiel:

Wait. What? The three options for the liberal democracies of Western Europe are Sharia law, “Chinese communist AI,” and some kind of green energy state? And there are “no other doors?” The only thing that separates that comment from a light-night, weed-infused dorm room bull session is his few billion dollars. That’s the person who should reshape the GOP? 

I’ve come to your inbox less to condemn the gurus (though people who commit fraud should pay the price), but to ask a different question. Why do we fall for them time and again?

I’m not someone who tells celebrities to “shut up and sing” or athletes to “shut up and dribble.” And I’d never tell Elon Musk to “shut up and get to Mars” or tell Peter Thiel, “shut up and facilitate cashless transactions.” I like the marketplace of ideas. I’m open to interesting thoughts from unlikely sources. 

But I object to the presumption of insight from famous or successful people. I object to the hero worship (or greed) I’ve seen with my own eyes, where sycophants and fans won’t tell the wealthy and famous obvious truths because they hope to bask in their reflected glory or benefit from their largesse.

David French, America, Can We Talk About Our Guru Problem?

It used to be stars and starlots on whose every oracular word we waited. Now it’s billionaires, more than one of whose bubbles could turn them into mere millionaires by tomorrow.

Blake Masters

Speaking of Peter Thiel, the George Soros of the Right (and neither of those two is as dumb or evil as their detractors think), one of his boys, Blake Masters, lost in Arizona.

I don’t need to have, and don’t have, an overall impression of Masters. But I’ve got some litmus tests and one of them is “if a candidate quotes the late Sam Francis without caveats, don’t vote for him.”

Francis was brilliant, atheist, and deeply racist. I appreciated his brilliance until his racism became undeniable, and it is why he should be “consigned to the dustbin of history.”

Federalist Society at a Crossroad

Peter Cannelos thinks the Federalist Society was all about reversing Roe v. Wade and is adrift now. (“You get your white whale and what do you do? What’s the next thing?”)

“Not so fast,” say David French and Sarah Isgur on Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast. That was never the purpose of the Society and its actual purpose remains vital. The real question is whether the Society will stand by its principles when populist Republicans, not liberals or progressives, are the ones trampling on the Constitution, as the Society has become closely identified with the GOP and the GOP has become performatively populist at the state level in particular.

David and Sarah seem to think FedSoc will stand by its principles initially, but that losing its “conservative” friends when it does so will intensify long-term pressure to forsake principle for politics. It’s the nature of those long-term pressures that make Cannelos’s piece worth reading. And he’s not necessarily wrong that abortion is what FedSoc was about in public impression.

Begin listening at 46:33.

EA

Although SBF and the collapse of FTX have cast a pall over EA, that’s unwarranted.

(If you find the prior paragraph undecipherable, congratulations: you’re more immune to ephemera than I am.)

We really should think about how much our charitable giving actually helps, not about how virtuous it makes us feel. That doesn’t mean we all should suddenly start giving only to deploy mosquito nets against malaria, but:

Aw, heck! I wrote most of the preceding before Ross Douthat weighed in. He touched on some of the same themes but added other good stuff. This link is supposed to get you through the New York Times paywall to read his take.

Michael Gerson, RIP

Still, Gerson deserves high marks for his criticism of Donald Trump and, above all, for his readiness to call out fellow evangelicals for their abject obeisance. The day after the assault on the Capitol, he wrote a column holding them more responsible than anyone else for “unleashing insurrectionists and domestic terrorists.”

I come back to this group repeatedly, not only because I share an evangelical background and resent those who dishonor it, but because the overwhelming support of evangelicals is the single largest reason that Trump possesses power in the first place. It was their malignant approach to politics that forced our country into its current nightmare. As white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, anarchists, criminals and terrorists took hold of the Republican Party, many evangelicals blessed it under the banner “Jesus Saves.”

Nor did he hesitate to name names: Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Ralph Reed, Penny Nance.

Mark Silk, Two cheers for Michael Gerson

Gerson’s reasons for coming back to evangelicals in the Trumposene were closely akin to my reasons.

For what it’s worth, I don’t share Silk’s condemnation of him for his role in selling the Iraq war. I voted for Bush’s “humbler foreign policy” in 2000, but I understood on 9/11 that the pressure for a strong military response against someone-or-other was going to prevail, and better people than I backed it at the time. I don’t think I ever supported the war (God forgive me if I did), but relentless resistance was futile.

Remembering our collective sins

He asked me if I had been to Auschwitz, in Poland. I hadn’t. “Don’t go there,” he said, shaking his head. “People are all with their phones. It should be prevented. And they go”—he raised his hand a few feet from his face and looked at his palm, emulating someone taking a selfie—“ ‘Me in front of the crematorium.’ ‘Me in front of the ramp.’ I mean, it’s so obscene.”

…

In the United States there are 41 million Black people; we make up 12.5 percent of the population. In Germany, there are approximately 120,000 Jewish people, out of a population of more than 80 million. They represent less than a quarter of 1 percent of the population. More Jewish people live in Boston than in all of Germany. (Today, many Jews in Germany are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their descendants.) Lots of Germans do not personally know a Jewish person.

This is part of the reason, Steiner believes, that Germany is able to make Holocaust remembrance a prominent part of national life; Jewish people are a historical abstraction more than they are actual people. In the United States, there are still millions of Black people. You cannot simply build some monuments, lay down some wreaths each year, and apologize for what happened without seeing the manifestation of those past actions in the inequality between Black and white people all around you.

Steiner also believes that the small number of Jewish people who do reside in Germany exist in the collective imagination less as people, and more as empty canvases upon which Germans can paint their repentance.

Clint Smith, How Germany Remembers the Holocaust

The story was so long that I almost didn’t read it, despite some trusted person’s recommendation. I’m glad I did. It brought tears to my eyes in places.

The explicit challenge is “how will America remember its sins?”, but that feels like an afterthought, to add a touch of “relevance,” and few answers are suggested.

Superwoman

“I would just like to announce that I am in my third trimester and I am an absolute powerhouse that can create human life. I can do ANYTHING … except sit or stand or lie down or recline,” – Mary Katharine Ham. (Via Andrew Sullivan).

New Category!

Today, I’m introducing a new category, “soccer-flopping.” All honor to David French for introducing me to the metaphor. The bad news is that “grievance mongering” may fall into disuse

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

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.

“This demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren”

I didn’t have anything to say yet about Uvalde, TX in my last blog. I have a (very) little to say now.

First, a timeless bur under our saddles: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Second, a caution: "We must do something!" is true. But we mustn’t do performative (dare I say "masturbatory"?) things — things that we already know or should know won’t bear any fruit beyond giving supporters momentary catharsis.

Third, two proposals that might actually improve things:

  • David French, Pass and Enforce Red Flag Laws. Now. (I am reliably informed that French is incorrect about only one red state having such a law; my fair state, Indiana, also has one. Surely we’re not considered "purple" because we went for Obama in 2008!) But Red Flag Laws won’t do any good until people hate slaughter of the innocents enough to risk destroying a friendship with someone who is taking leave of reality while stockpiling weapons.
  • Nicholas Kristof, These Gun Reforms Could Save 15,000 Lives. We Can Achieve Them

The nature of the problem, as best I can tell, is that American life isn’t about what is good but is rather about nothing at all (which is, at least, broadly inoffensive and inclusive of most tastes and creeds) or about violence itself. The scope of the problem includes every facet of life that culture touches, which means most every element of daily life.

… [A] culture of death is like a prophecy, or a sickness: It bespeaks itself in worsening phases. Right now, we find ourselves foreclosing upon our own shared future both recklessly and deliberately—and perhaps, gradually, beginning to behave as if there is no future for us at all; soon, I sometimes worry, we may find ourselves faced with a darkening present, no faith in our future, and a doomed tendency to chase violence with violence.

… this demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren …

When we say, in despair, that “these men are byproducts of a society we’ve created; how could we possibly stop them?,” we could be referring to almost anyone in the great chain of diffuse responsibility for our outrageous, inexcusable gun-violence epidemic—the lobbyists who argued for these guns to be sold like sporting equipment, the politicians who are too happy to oblige them, the shooters themselves.

Elizabeth Bruenig, as dark as I’ve ever seen her. I can’t unequivocally agree with every word of that ("these guns," as I understand it, are "sporting equipment" even if they’re tricked out to look military) but I surely agree with “these men are byproducts of a society we’ve created.”

I am not a liberal.

At least, not in the way that some people think.

Having grown up in the evangelical community, someone who was “liberal” meant that he did not believe that Jesus is God, or that He was born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit, or that He rose from the dead, or that His crucifixion saved humanity from sin, or that the Bible stories of miracles are true, or that Scripture is authoritative and communicates God’s Word.

I believe all these things.

In this sense, when I became Orthodox, I became even “less liberal.” In addition to the above, I also believe things that are even older than the evangelical community. I believe in the necessity of baptism for the remission of sins. I believe that the Eucharist is the bread and wine transmuted into the Body and Blood of Christ. I believe in the continuing presence of the saints, led by the greatest worshiper, pray-er, and worker of all, the Virgin Mary.

But there has been something of a “confusion of categories.” In the aftermath of the mass shooting of 19 children and 2 teachers on Tuesday (May 24th), I was called “liberal.” Why? Because I called for the minimum age for gun purchase to be raised to 21, nationwide. Because I called for universal background checks at every gun purchase – including gun shows and private sales. Because I called for the ban of the sale of military weaponry – including assault rifles – to civilians.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias. There’s more there.

His positions are not a good proxy for political liberalism in the modern American sense and they’re absurd as a proxy for deviation from Christian orthodoxy.

Sarah Isgur, Harvard-trained lawyer, central advisor to a Republican Presidential campaign, wife of one of the nation’s top SCOTUS advocates, and mother of a Texas toddler, broke down over Uvalde on the Advisory Opinions podcast when she thought about her shopping quest for a backpack for her son to start preschool. (She recovered nicely.)

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.

Faith Issues, Roe (and more)

Faith matters

Theology vs. Academic Theology

Theologians, like all academics, have to keep coming up with original things to say. If you just kept repeating the words you received from your old professors, it would get you nowhere. What you need is fresh, even daring, new material. And that means theology will always be in flux.

A venerable Catholic theologian once told me, with great irritation, “Lay people don’t understand what theology is!” They think it’s set in stone, he said, but it’s always evolving and progressing. He seemed to think that theology was something lay people could never hope to keep up with. Their meddling was annoying. They should get out of the way, and wait for the professionals to tell them what the new thinking is.

Theology has a completely different basis in Orthodoxy. It doesn’t change, because it is the faith taught by the Apostles themselves; Orthodoxy is the unbroken continuation of the Church founded by Christ, and carried by the Apostles into the world. We do keep repeating the words we received from our teachers and elders in Christ. Orthodoxy doesn’t need updating, because it provides everything a person needs to be saturated with the presence of God (a process called “theosis”). It fits the needs of every human being like water and air do, no matter what culture or time.

Frederica Matthewes-Green in a letter to Rod Dreher.

Do take note of that first paragraph. Heresy is baked right into the cake of academic theology as presently structured. And that’s an insight that is baked pretty deeply into my bones now. Calling a theological writing “novel” is generally a powerful insult in Orthodoxy.

Not following which faith?

People often talk to me about their adult children who are not following the Lord. I think they want to introduce them to me, as if my brand of wacky Miss Frizzle theologian would inspire them to follow Jesus (reader, I am not that compelling). I have started to ask these folks, which faith do you think your children are longer following? Tell me about it. Was it perhaps one that promised that Jesus would be primarily a place where they got their psychological needs met? Did you raise them to believe that middle-class respectability and good religious feelings were the goal of following Christ? Did you teach them how to suffer?

To the Shire

Classical Liberalism or Postliberalism?

Over a busy weekend (my final choral concert of the Spring), I almost forgot to share two very civil and worthwhile (opening?) arguments on how conservative Christians should behave in 2022:

Apart from the response’s resonance with my lifelong habits of thought, I think the response convincingly shows that the opening volley’s premise that we’ve recently entered “negative world” (cultural hostility to Christianity, which the coiner of the term thinks follows a long stretch of American approbation of Christianity and a few decades of neutrality) is dubious if not mythical. The folks who are more openly hostile now were just subtler before. I fear I greeted the original “negative world” theory with a lot of confirmation bias.

And of course, this debate, nominally about Tim Keller’s approach to politics, is a microcosm of the much larger argument, widely contested among self-identified Christians, about classical liberalism (French) versus some manner of postliberalism (Wood). Don’t cabin this argument.

Update: Rod Dreher weighs in against French, failing badly if he was trying to cover himself in glory instead of just waving the tribal flag. I wonder if American Conservative would give him a sabbatical while he works through a few things? I wonder if it would really make things better if they did.

The impending “reversal of Roe“

The salutary political consequences

Peggy Noonan goes a bit meta on the consequences if SCOTUS “reverses Roe“:

[Roe] left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

How will the court “reverse Roe“?

Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast persuaded me, without saying it in so many words, that Alito’s first draft won’t be his last. He has a bit of a needle to thread (the needle is oxymoronically named “Substantive Due Process”) and the first draft doesn’t persuasively thread it.

The main article in Friday’s Morning Dispatch also covers the question of unenumerated rights that might theoretically be at risk if the opinion doesn’t get the reasoning right.

My own opinion (caveat: I’m retired and rusty on legal analysis, and my opinion has been clarified only recently by thinking harder than before about stare decisis) is that:

  • almost all the cases recognizing unenumerated rights over the last 60 years have been bogus, the right to marry across lines of “race” (Loving v. Virginia) being the only exception I can think of readily;
  • of the remaining bogus decisions (Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell) I can think of none that require reversal under the considerations that come into play in stare decisis. That’s another way of saying that “wrongly decided” (or “bogus”) doesn’t necessarily imply “should be reversed”; it’s more complicated than that.

Concise

The latest theme on the political left is that the Supreme Court Justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade are at war with democracy. It’s a strange argument, since overturning Roe would merely return abortion policy to the states for political debate in elections and legislatures. That’s the definition of democracy.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Most Editorial Board editorials aren’t worth reading, but that first paragraph was at least concise. The rest of the editorial? Meh.

American progressives, and some on the right, have convinced themselves that legal abortion will disappear the moment the Supreme Court reverses its Roe v. Wade precedent. Since the Court is contemplating this, readers might appreciate examples from democracies that have grappled with this difficult issue without nine Justices to tell them what to do.

We mean Europe, where abortion is legal in most countries, usually with limits that are more strict than America’s and generally as a result of democratic choice.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board separately.

Worth your time

Overruling Roe Would Extinguish A Judicially Created Right, But Would Restore The People’s “Precious Right To Govern Themselves”

The other stuff

An artefact of sensible times

For those curious, the Fifth Circuit [U.S. Court of Appeals] is holding its conference in Nashville because, apparently, there are no facilities large enough in Mississippi to host this confab.

Update: I have since been reliably informed that judicial conferences are not held in Mississippi for another reason: all of the hotels large enough in the state are attached to casinos, and some rule prohibits holding judicial functions in places attached to casinos. As a result, several hotels in Mississippi are large enough, but due to the casinos, none are not suitable.

Josh Blackman

An interesting rule from the days when people were smart enough to know that casinos are disreputable. They still are — as is commercial gambling on sports.

But we’ve decided to monetize vice, often with the promise that the revenue will fund schools. Monetizing vice does indeed “school” children, but not in any good way.

Surviving big cultural disasters

Having an inner life is how we can survive if the world falls apart … It’s how people have endured and thrived living under authoritarian regimes … If a populist regime … is in the cards, it’s time to become bird-watchers and hikers and readers of classics and take care of our friends and children and ignore the ignorance and cruelty afar.

Garrison Keillor, with some historic particulars elided. Some of the elisions may leave the impression that Keillor is opposed to all populism, though I don’t know that. I’d like to think there could be a populism that isn’t ignorant and cruel, though I see few signs of one yet.

Facing the end of life

I realize that we are all circling around the Airport of Death, but it just seems to me that if you take that step [moving to a retirement community] it means that you are entering your landing pattern. I think that I will rather just live until I die.

Terry Cowan.

At 73, I think I’ve fairly realistically reckoned with my mortality at last.

But that can be dangerous; you mustn’t just sit and wait for the grim reaper when getting up and moving could keep him away a bit longer. Sloth is a sin even for oldsters. And even if moving hurts a bit.

Wordplay

  • the right place to be is surely in the woods, or in a monastery. Or in a monastery in the woods.

Paul Kingsnorth

  • All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton

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.