Category: Education

Saturday Notebook Dump 5-11-24

Culture

Mind your own business

I have mixed feelings about Aaron Renn, of whom you may not even have heard. But he has a provocative suggestion, which I’ll paraphrase.

Why should conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, oppose jackassery like the Columbia University occupation? Columbia doesn’t love conservatives, or Christians.

Columbia itself produced the brats who now threaten it. Do we even have a horse in this race? Would it be bad for us if Columbia paid the price for what it has become?

Such is liberal hegemony in the cultural institutions (arts, education, media) that we lament it constantly. Why then should we leap to defend these leftist institutions when they’re under threat from folks even further to the left?

There’s something to be said for sitting back and enjoying the show.

AR-15 as totem

In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading. 

Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson then really gets into the weeds. Though I’m not a huge gun enthusiast, I enjoy reading columns like this because of what they say about the sloppy journalism they’re critiquing and because I often learn things I didn’t know, like:

It is probably worth noting here that AR-style rifles are used in a very, very small share of shootings in the United States: All rifles together typically account for something less than 3 percent of the firearms homicides in the United States in a given year. Rifles are more commonly used in mass shootings, but, even in those high-profile crimes, they are used in a minority of cases, about 28 percent. The most common firearm used in a violent crime in the United States is the 9mm semiautomatic handgun—which is the most common handgun found in the United States.

Mass shooters often choose AR-style rifles for obvious reasons—because they are common, relatively easy to operate, and the rifle that most Americans are most familiar with—and for reasons that are best described as totemic. … Gun-control advocates who want to prohibit only AR-style rifles are seeking a merely symbolic victory—those other semiautomatic rifles would remain on the market and presumably would be used for the common legitimate and rare criminal purposes AR-style rifles are used for.

…

We could—and probably should—be more aggressive in prosecuting the crime of simple illegal firearm possession absent some additional violent offense, and we probably should hand down stiffer sentences more consistently for that crime rather than doing what we do now—which is dismissing the great majority of those cases or pleading them down to some trivial misdemeanor.

But rigorously enforcing the laws regarding firearm possession with prison sentences is going to mean a lot more young men becoming incarcerated felons earlier in life, and it is nearly certain that those young men will be disproportionately black and poor. … We should probably arrest and prosecute a lot more straw-buyers than we do, but we should be clear-eyed about who those straw-buyers are going to be—people with otherwise clean criminal records, often girlfriends or family members of convicted felons—before we start locking them up.

…

And they wonder why demagogues get so much mileage out of claims about “fake news.” It’s shameful stuff.

Whew! That’s a relief!

Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself.

Alan Jacobs, back to the brows

I know the internet has dumbed us down, and I’m not exempt from that. But I try to keep challenging books in my book list. My need to read other things, too, is hereby vindicated!

Jacobs throws out another thesis about “the brows” (low-, middle-, and high-):

For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Intrinsic values

When people say that something is “valuable in and of itself,” I think what they mean is simply that it has no economic or social value — note Kirsch’s contrast between intrinsic value and something valued because it “makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.” Someone might say that when we say some artifact or experience is intrinsically valuable we’re saying that it does not have any instrumental value — but isn’t a song that delights me instrumental to that delight? And isn’t that okay? 

So I think that when we describe something as having intrinsic value, what we really mean is that the value it provides is higher than or nobler than any furthering of crassly economic or social ambitions. We’re indirectly and somewhat sloppily appealing to a hierarchy of goods. And maybe — especially in the context of debates about liberal education, which is at least partly the context of Kirsch’s essay — we should be more explicit about that, and conscious of what our hierarchy is and why we affirm it.

We are blessed that Alan Jacobs, (intrinsic values) uses this blog as a digital notebook, tagging his entries for future retrieval.

AI gonna sell us stuff

[W]hen the hysterical claims about the coming of “the Singularity” and quickly-approaching AI doom/utopia subside, what we’ll find is that most of what AI is doing is a more complex and sophisticated version of what Silicon Valley already does: giving us increasingly-aggressive recommendations for how to sate our various needs.

…

The longstanding battle between the individual and the state will come to look quaint in comparison to the battle of the human against the profit-maximizing AI, an entity that is distributed and depersonalized and so can have no personal accountability. And it will all be happening with a populace that has grown used to seeing digital systems as permanent authorities that they have no ability to defy.

Freddie deBoer

Peak Woke?

Both wokeness and anti-wokeness have lost their transgressive edge. Now they’re both kind of “cringe,” as the kids say.

And that is a sign of healing. 

One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way the fringes symbiotically feed off each other. Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen for Republican House fundraising efforts would be for the “Squad” of far-left members of Congress to be replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be primaried by an intelligent Republican who doesn’t talk about Jewish space lasers.

Jonah Goldberg

News-Be-Gone

The news industry is Society’s appendix – permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed.

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

This is advice I’ve been unable to follow very far.

Legalia

Picking dead pigeons in the Park

Jonathan Alter has a better idea than putting Trump in jail for further contempt, with all the Secret Service and other complications. Jail for the Chief? There’s a Better Punishment.

Education

The beginning of the end … of this particular miserable chapter

MIT sours on DEI: MIT has done away with mandatory diversity statements in their hiring process. The president of the school, Sally Kornbluth, told John Sailer: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” This is a watershed moment: MIT is the first elite school to reverse course on this policy. Let’s see what schools follow suit.

Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press

DEI was the latest chapter in the effort to purge wrongthinking conservatives from our institutions. Its end will be the beginning of a re-branded effort.

Campus

  • As university administrators nationwide grapple with how to deal with anti-Israel encampments, former Nebraska senator and current University of Florida President Ben Sasse wrote in the Wall Street Journal of a model to follow. “At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended,” he wrote. “We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas. … For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. … Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties.”

The Morning Dispatch

The World

Israel, Hamas, Gaza

  • A Palestinian man living in the U.S. offers both grief for his family who have died in Israel’s war against Hamas and condemnation for the terrorist organization that sacrificed his homeland. “Thirty-one,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote for The Times of London. “That’s how many of my extended family members have died in Gaza since October 7. … The past seven months have entailed endless sleepless nights, close calls, false alarms and frantic attempts to help locate missing family members.” But the pro-Palestianian, anti-Israel narrative in the West misses a key truth, he argued. “Many believe Gaza was this unbelievably awful place before October 7, an unrelenting prison with nothing in it worth living for. They then conclude that Hamas’s horrendous attack was a legitimate reaction to Israeli policies that made Gaza a concentration camp. But this perspective misses an important truth. It fails to recognise that even with Israel’s multifaceted blockade, which has been in place since 2007, Gaza was a beautiful place that meant so much to its residents and people. … Hamas needlessly and criminally threw all of this away as part of nefarious calculations by violent and homicidal leaders who have utter disregard and contempt for the average Palestinian citizen.”

The Morning Dispatch

Politics

On not doubling down

Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?

… Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a lengthy and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”

…

“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. …

How had he made such a mistake?

“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”

Pamela Paul, One Black Conservative Continues to Stand Apart (emphasis added)

Forming alliances on the basis of shared hatreds is soul-scarring.

Of course he said the quiet part out loud

That brings us to a Washington Post article this morning. At a Mar-a-Lago meeting in April, oil executives complained that despite pouring hundreds of millions into lobbying the government, the Biden administration had pursued stronger environmental regulations. “Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House,” the Post reports. In exchange, Trump vowed to roll back current regulations and freeze future ones. He told them that, given the savings, a billion bucks would be a “deal” for them.

What Trump was offering is entirely legal and absolutely corrupt. (Or to borrow a phrase: very legal and very uncool.) Thanks to Trump’s bluntness, there can be no hair-splitting about what’s going on here, and that’s good for public understanding. Trump asked special interests for an eye-popping fee in exchange explicit favors. Trump and the oil companies might argue (dubiously) that their preferred regime would actually be better for consumers, but they are cutting “the people” out of the discussion entirely, subverting democracy. The deal is getting done between Trump and the suits, behind closed doors. It’s a good reminder that Trump’s claim to being an outsider is a sham.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Legal, Corrupt Offer to Oil Executives

Bipartisanship today

Who’s responsible for the illegal immigration problem?

When it comes to immigration, it’s true that the Biden administration belatedly worked with legislators to settle on a compromise bill that would stem the flow of migrants (including refugees) to the southern border. But it’s also true that Republicans, led by Trump, decided they’d prefer to keep the border a festering problem through an election year in order to hurt the president.

That’s cynical, hardball politics. But that’s just another way of saying it’s politics well played. (It ain’t beanbag, after all.)

Damon Linker. The key words are belated, prefer, fester and cynic.

Momala

[2020] was the year when friendships were shattered and livelihoods ruined because someone didn’t post a black square on Instagram; when every suburban wine mom was frantically reading White Fragility for her anti-racist book club; when members of Congress posed for an absurdly self-serious photo shoot draped in kente cloth. It was the year when representation mattered—to the exclusion of basically everything else. 

This miasma of liberal white guilt and frantic, performative virtue-signaling was the birthplace of many a bizarre cultural artifact, like the anti-racism research center for which Ibram X. Kendi received (and squandered) $43 million, or the $250,000 “Woke Kindergarten” program that taught five-year-olds in San Francisco to “disrupt whiteness.” But its most lasting legacy, arguably, is Kamala Harris, who ended up a skipped heartbeat away from the top job for reasons that were primarily aesthetic: once Biden promised to pick a woman of color as his running mate, her selection was all but guaranteed.

…

[H]er social justice credentials are thoroughly undermined by her actual record: one of a career prosecutor with a penchant for authoritarian overreach and a hostility to civil liberties.

As an attorney, she—or people working on her behalf—routinely fought to keep innocent people in prison, to avoid compensating the wrongfully convicted, and to protect corrupt cops and prosecutors. In her capacity as California’s district attorney, she stood in the way of advanced DNA testing that could have proved the innocence of a man who had spent four decades on death row—until a 2018 story about the case created bad press for her presidential campaign, at which point she hastily (and uselessly) declared that she now supported the test.

==And then there’s her legal war against the founders of Backpage.com, a classified ads site with a robust “Adult Services” section. Harris charged Michael Lacey and James Larkin with conspiracy to commit pimping back in 2016. This eight-year effort is the clearest manifestation I have ever seen of the phrase “the process is the punishment.” In August 2023, on the eve of yet another court battle, James Larkin committed suicide. In reaction to this news, Reason’s Matt Welch noted: “You will see 100 times more ink spilled this year on chimerical right-wing book bans than you will on the vice president’s scapegoat blowing his brains out.” He was right, sort of; the actual ratio of book ban coverage as compared to Larkin’s suicide was more like 10,000 to one.

I’ve commented little on Kamala Harris because she has been nearly invisible as Vice President in these tumultuous times. But I’m grateful to Kat Rosenfield (America Doesn’t Need Momala Harris) for this reminder of why I detested her conduct in California government and rued Joe Biden selecting her for VP.

Misogyny

Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four more years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.

By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Misogyny and Stormy Daniels

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.

Saturday, 4/6/24

Today is that day the Purdue Boilermaker Men advance to the NCAA Championship game by ending the fairy tale run of DJ Burns and NC State. Remember, you read it here first. (Caveat: I have no money riding on any games and you certainly shouldn’t put money on my prediction.)

Meta

America the experiment

America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work,

Barack Obama

No sheaf of papers can protect us

Joseph de Maistre. Writing in 1809, he scoffed at the idea that any document written by mortal hands could ever design and establish genuinely new foundational laws. The spirit of any such laws was invariably already written on the hearts of those men who attempted to crudely reduce them to mere lines on a piece of paper. “Precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written,” he wrote. The true constitution of a strong and functional nation was always “that admirable, unique, and infallible public spirit, beyond all praise, which directs everything, which protects everything. What is written is nothing.”

…

What is America’s implicit constitution today? Naturally, it’s never been fully captured in writing, though some authors, such as Christopher Caldwell, have variously attempted to nail it down here and there. If pressed to summarise, I might say it is one that values safety and security over freedom; top-down control over self-governance; empty egalitarian posturing over excellence; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; bureaucracy over accountability; narcissistic emotivism over duty; fantasy over reality; global ambitions over national loyalty; dreams of progress over eternal and transcendent truths — in short, the same spirit that animates our out-of-control managerial regime. It’s the spirit which saw that regime not hesitate to impose Covid lockdowns, or trash the rule of law and attempt to jail political opponents (and for half the country to view this as acceptable or even admirable); it’s what has produced Supreme Court justices who fret free speech would undermine the security state.

N.S. Lyons, at UnHerd

Luxury beliefs before 2019

The neologism “luxury beliefs” is only five years old, but what it describes was noted decades ago (if not earlier):

Harlem itself, and every individual Negro in it, is a living condemnation of our so-called “culture.” Harlem is there by way of a divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue: they are God’s commentary on the whole of our society.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

And again I say, “Beauty Will Save the World”

At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky.

Garrison Keillor

Rackets

EVs

With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to consultancy firm AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.

Via Dense Discovery Issue 282

Trump looting the GOP

One might assume that a presidential nominee who generates as much devotion as Mr. Trump would be a financial boon to his party. One would be wrong. With Mr. Trump, everything is about Mr. Trump … While the Republican base may be smitten with Mr. Trump, plenty of big-money donors are skittish about bankrolling his nonsense. The former president has been scrambling to close the gap, leering at potential funders as if they were contestants at the Miss Universe pageant.

Michelle Cottle, Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party

I haven’t seen gullibility like today’s GOP since Harlem stood by its man Adam Clayton Powell.

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

Formerly friendly, I’m now a little leery of Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society) provided Donald Trump with the list of outstanding conservative prospective Supreme Court Nominees that Trump ran on in 2016 and that probably made the difference in the Election. Kudos to him for that. I didn’t believe Trump would keep his promise to nominate from that list, and for that and other reasons, I didn’t vote for him.

But about the time Leo got on the Trump train, his life appears to have take a dramatic turn:

The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million between 2016 and 2020.

During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:

In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the Mclean, Va. home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.

The complaint was based in part on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”

Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around

Part of my leeriness is probably because I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, which describes Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson’s extremely profitable financial con in his promotion of the 1920s Klan. The story is full of MAGA-like personalities (right down to the rapes) and profiteering.

Trump’s second term, with Leonard Leo’s help, is shaping up to be a nightmare for true conservatism and a repudiation of much of the excellent work Leo’s judicial list did in the first Trump term. Truly Donald Trump has a reverse Midas touch.

Just asking questions

I’m no longer a Ben Shapiro fan, but when he’s right, he’s right.

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:

  1. God is on my political party’s side.
  2. My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.
  3. My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.
  4. I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.
  5. It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.

Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. …

Political Therapeutic Deism has the benefit of making clear what we are seeing is the misappropriation of religious language and symbols for political ends. It also harkens to a term (Moral Therapeutic Deism) which has been thoroughly rejected by some of the very kind of people “Christian nationalists” seek to persuade to their way of thinking. They want to equate opposition to their political proposals as opposition to Christianity itself. Why would we help them?

Michael Wear

Until a better term comes along, I expect to use political therapeutic deism for the faux-evangelical Trumpists that MSM calls “white Christian nationalist.”

“But the judges” no longer applies

For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”

Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell. 

Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration important legal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.

But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers. 

Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government.

…

Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.

Gregg T. Nunziata, The Conservative Legal Movement Got Everything It Wanted. It Could Lose It All

Anyone who says “but the judges” to justify voting for Trump in 2024 is seriously misguided. He’s disappointed with his first-term SCOTUS nominees in particular, as they’ve not been the kinds of toadies he wants. Next time, he’ll nominate toadies, not excellent jurists, and since the Senate is going to flip (11 Republicans are up for re-election, 23 Democrats) he’ll get them confirmed.

Good advice, since abandoned

Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.

Rod Dreher, December 12, 2020. I’m sorry to say that he has since reconciled himself to a supposed necessity to vote for Trump.

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

Scotland has a new hate speech law that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” J.K. Rowling threw down the gauntlet:

On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.” … “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

The Free Press

Bomb-thrower

Responding to an Emma Green New Yorker article on classical education:

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

Alan Jacobs, against the factory of unreason

Nellie snippets

  • Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. (I could have pulled this for “Rackets,” above.)
  • It is odd that Trump got the reputation of being The End of the American Press, when Biden is really the one who hates questions and shuns journalists. Remember Trump? How he would actually never stop talking? How he’d sit and antagonize reporters endlessly? But oh, he’d talk. It was alarming, often described as “rambling.” But at least we all knew exactly what was going through his mind (chaos, tangents, rage, pettiness, pretty good jokes, Rosie O’Donnell, more Rosie O’Donnell, why was it always Rosie O’Donnell).
  • [S]tudent loan relief is the wrong approach. Colleges should simply not cost this much. Solution: eliminate 90 percent of university administrator roles, since at least that many are fully fake. Offer incentives for kids to enroll in trade schools or community colleges. Boom, loan crisis solved, you’re welcome. Next topic.
  • From Reuters
  • America’s leading women’s rights group of yesteryear is still arguing that it’s white supremacy to maintain girls’ sports. Here’s NOW, the National Organization of Women: “Repeat after us: Weaponizing womanhood against other women is white supremacist patriarchy at work. Making people believe there isn’t enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work.” Yes, it’s white supremacist patriarchy to argue. . . that someone who’s gone through male puberty might have an unfair advantage in, let’s say, rugby. Interesting. Fascinating. I will repeat until I am clean.

Nellie Bowles

I’m that guy

When I think of the consciousness that generates the circular sorrow of “Ifs eternally,” or the one trying to find the one thing that will unify all the disparate experiences of one life, I think of a man—almost always a man, though there are notable exceptions—sitting alone in a room and doggedly trying to figure it all out.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

Saturday, 2/3/24

I have competing calendar events for this morning. One was the funeral of an acquaintance whose obituary suggested memorial gifts to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Read between those lines, though the toxicology report won’t be back for weeks. Lord have mercy!) The other was a baptism of a family of five, which family features spouses of dramatically different skin tones — a joyous first for our parish — and the reception by Chrismation (i.e., no baptism because of a prior valid baptism) of yet another Purdue student.

As a baptism is pretty obligatory for a Parish Cantor, I am glad to take that more joyous option.

The Gender Dysphoria beat

Toss the kids’ smart phones

Mark Zuckerberg would presumably have chosen a pummeling in the dojo over the grilling he endured on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Meta chief, along with executives from X, Snap, Discord, and TikTok (wait, didn’t we ban those guys?), was called to testify in a Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children. In a tussle with Senator Josh Hawley, Zuckerberg was cornered into turning to the families of children who were victims of online abuse and exploitation and apologizing for what their kids had been through. I mean, I guess the dressing-down of a new master of the universe scratches an itch. But did the hearing do anything to help those who want safer social media for kids? 

Free Press contributor Abigail Shrier knows these issues better than most. She has a new book on the mental health of young Americans—Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up—out later this month. I asked Abigail for her thoughts on the hearing. Here’s what she told me: 

Gender dysphoria, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourette syndrome: the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens. 

Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association, quick to warn the public about the dangers of systemic racism, police tactics, and climate change, has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously. (See the APA’s belated, laughably weak, and equivocating health advisory.) 

The simplest solution, Abigail says, is for parents to throw out their kids’ phones. But experts won’t suggest that because it will put them out of a job:

One of the best things mental health experts could have done to improve the mental health of teens would not grant them an ongoing role in kids’ lives. Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy. 

In other words, parents: you’re on your own.

The Free Press

Conversion therapies

I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.

A detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, via Pamela Paul, As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do..

More from the article:

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

I have obsessed enough over the madness of the gender-affirming approach to gender dysphoric kids that nothing Pamela Paul said was new to me. Nothing.

But her piece is still huge because I’ve previously heard all this only from publications at or beyond the edges of the Overton Window, whereas this Pamela Paul piece is in the New York Times, fer cryin’ out loud, (which is a sure sign that the pendulum has begun swinging back from the furthest left/progressive extremes – or maybe of the end of the world).

One of the reasons I’m not in favor of blowing up the incorrigibly corrupt “system” (by electing some chaos-monkey to the Presidency, for instance) is that the system, screwed up though it be, is not incorrigible. There are people of good will who are mistaken but persuadable.

Culture

Perspective

Scruton once wrote about the moral philosopher Peter Singer: “It has been said of him, as he indelicately reminds us in the preface, that he is ‘the most influential living philosopher,’ and this is perhaps true. But the influence has been purchased at the cost of the philosophy. After all, there was a sense in which Mao was the most influential living poet, and Hitler the most influential living painter.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty, Rush’s Place

A promising new Substack

The founders of Poems Ancient and Modern are Joseph Bottum, a writer living in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina. Acutely sensitive to copyright (violated by far too many online postings), we will be limiting ourselves to works that are in the public domain (currently those from before 1929)

Here We Stand – Poems Ancient and Modern.

I have appreciated every issue so far.

The most successful counter-intuitive principle ever

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Playing by your own rules

Objectors may point out that this raises a coordination problem. If mainstream sexual culture now assumes that women will by default be sterile and sexually available, then how is any heterosexual woman who refuses this dynamic ever to find a partner? Won’t men simply pass them over for someone who plays by the usual rules? One of my interviewees doesn’t think so. Katie, 25, a researcher from Washington, DC, says that in her experience, dating while refusing birth control was ‘not at all awkward or weird’. Rather, in her view, it serves to filter out frivolous would-be partners: ‘If you’re serious about it, and they’re serious and thoughtful too, then it’s not an issue.’

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Why logorrhea?

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Eye for eye leaves the world blind

A conservative young man visited my office some years ago and recited a long list of illegitimate, dishonest, manipulatory techniques used by the left.  I said words to the effect, “I know all this.  Why are you telling me?”  He replied “Because unless our side does the same things, we’ll lose the country.”  I answered, “If you do what is evil so that good will result, you will destroy everything about your country worth saving, and you will be just like those whom you oppose.”  I’m afraid he was very disappointed in me, and left my office in sorrow.

J Budziszewski, Conservative Judicial Activism?

A small parable

When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.

Alan Jacobs, a small parable

The parable is just three paragraphs and worth reading. It seems unfair for me to cut-and-paste it all.

The Education Hoax

Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell via The Economist

Why I still read legal blogs and listen to legal podcasts

I was prepared to blog my incredulity at E. Jean Carroll actually having suffered $83 million of financial harm at the hands mouth of you-know-who. David Lat does not hide the answer:

The big legal news of the week was the $83.3 million defamation verdict secured by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump, consisting of $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages. This trial was only on the issue of defamation damages for Trump’s continued public attacks on Carroll; in an earlier trial, a jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages.

(Emphasis added)

Doggerel Break

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

W.H. Auden, The More Loving One, via Alan Jacobs, Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition

From here, it’s all downhill, with politics and the most ridiculous conspiracy theory so far this year. On the other hand, the politics are

Politics generally

Nobles and Meritocrats

The nobleman may be contrasted with the meritocrat [the bourgeois], who occupies his station by virtue of his intelligence (as certified by gatekeeping institutions) and his hard work. He is emphatically an individual. Nobody handed him anything. He doesn’t own land and isn’t tied to any particular place; he may have been plucked from the hinterlands by the SAT test and groomed to enter the labor market of the global, managerial economy. He may or may not have children. If he does, he will try to pass on every advantage to them, but this is done primarily by accumulating enough money so his children will have a shot at entry to those same gatekeeping institutions. After that, they are on their own. He passes on to them an open-ended opportunity, not a definite form of life. The meritocrat owes nothing to those who came before, and likely finds it hard to imagine what shape his children’s lives will take. Living within the horizon of his own life, likely thousands of miles from the place of his birth, it is perfectly natural that he should not feel any special responsibility to sustain a culture. He may even work in the machinery of culture-replacement, as it pays well.

…

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

Matthew Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

The right’s new abnormal normal

[W]e now live in a political world oriented around the following two-step electoral process: First, the online right galvanizes and mobilizes a growing base of conspiracy-addled voters with chum, ranging from Twitter memes to QAnon to bullshit about Pentagon psyops, pop stars, football players, deadly vaccine mandates, and other paranoid nonsense; second, the GOP uses negative partisanship to keep more normie Republican and Republican-leaning voters on side when the time comes to cast ballots.

It barely worked in 2016. It nearly worked in 2020. How about in 2024? It’s much too early to know. I’ll simply say I wouldn’t be so sure the Swift-Kelce psychodrama that has obsessed the online right over the past week will do anything to make a Trump victory any less likely.

Welcome to the right’s new abnormal normal.

Damon Linker

Enacting indignation against one’s owner

Sen. Josh Hawley’s grilling of Mr. Zuckerberg made an impression. Mr. Hawley enjoys enacting indignation in hearings and is good at it.

…

It was satisfying. Why are we skeptical it will lead to helpful legislative action?

…

A friend who worked in Washington a few years ago was struck by the question he was asked at a lunch of think tankers and lobbyists: “Who owns you?” Not who do you work for, what do you believe, but who bought your loyalty? It is the Washington problem in three words.

The social-media companies have bought up Washington. They give money to politicians and political action committees, to think tanks and media shops; they hire the most influential and respected. They give the children of politicians jobs. They’ve got it wired. Mr. Kennedy mordantly joked about this at the hearings: “We know we’re in a recession when Google has to lay off 25 members of Congress.”

There’s reason to believe it’s all Kabuki. The CEOs show up for a day of ritual denunciation, then go on unbothered. It’s not a high price to pay for the lives they lead.

Peggy Noonan

Sauce for the Gander

From House Bill No. 1017, introduced in the Indiana Legislature Jan. 8 by Rep. Vernon Smith, a Gary Democrat:

Sec. 5. (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), a school, an employee or staff member of a school, or a third party vendor used by a school to provide instruction may not provide instruction to a student in kindergarten through grade 12 concerning:

(1) Christopher Columbus; or

(2) a President of the United States who owned an enslaved person.

(b) Instruction concerning a person described in subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2) is permitted if the instruction concerns the person’s involvement in the:

(1) institution of slavery;

(2) harmful effects of colonialism; or

(3) decimation of indigenous populations throughout the world.

Wall Street Journal’s Notable and Quotable

I suspect that Rep. Smith is trolling Republicans, who seemingly are forever (though less commonly in Indiana) are proposing reverse mirror images of such bans.

Do you think the mainstream media will howl about censoring history? Nah. Me either.

Brussels’ ultimatum to Budapest

Hungary is blocking 50 billion Euros of additional EU aid to Ukraine, and the EU leadership is threatening retaliation against Hungary:

Whatever his sins and failings may be, Viktor Orbán isn’t presiding over the decline of the West. It is, alas, true that Orbán stands naked before the mighty Brussels bureaucracy, determined to siphon off more taxpayer money to continue an unwinnable war, in the name of a pan-European fantasy, when they ought to be spending it on serious needs at home (for example, have you seen how feeble European militaries are?). They may, in the end, force him to capitulate. But if you look closely, it is Orbán, the despised outsider, who informs the Emperors of the Inner Ring, the embodiments of a failing imperial ideology, that they have no clothes.

Rod Dreher

Orbán did fold before the week was over. Ukraine is getting more money from the West.

From the Free Press

It has been nearly a month, but I don’t think I shared these yet:

What in heaven’s name was the point?

First the White House interns, now seventeen anonymous Biden campaign staffers have penned an open letter calling on Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. I’m all for open letters. But you must sign your name. And if you’re going to make it anonymous, and you were still only able to get seventeen people signed on, you sort of played yourself.

Nellie Bowles

Wages of disenfranchisement

The law exists to maintain order. It’s not for settling our political disputes. That’s the rule. When you criminalize dissent and equate nonconformity with terrorism, you have lost the thread of how this country works. When you joke about putting opponents in reeducation camps so they can be converted into loyal followers, you channel the regime in Cuba. When you prosecute an opposition presidential candidate, you practice the same style of mafia politics as Vladimir Putin in Russia. When you ban a candidate’s name from the ballot to preserve “our democracy,” you sound, frankly, like you have gone nuts. And believe me: it will come back to haunt you.

…

If your side loses, look in the mirror. You are the reason your side lost in 2016. A man like Trump can only get elected because he’s not you and there are few alternatives. Reflect on how you can win back those who feel so disenfranchised that they would vote for such a man over your choice.

Martin Gurri, Don’t Worry About Donald Trump. Worry About Yourself

This week’s Ezra Klein podcast features Democrat operative Ruy Teixeira, who goes on at some length about the Democrats losing the working class — the same folks I think Gurri was talking about.

Axios: Trump Campaign Donors Footed the Bill for More Than $50M in Legal Fees Last Year (H/T TMD)

The NFL/Tay-Tay/Biden/Psy-Op kerfuffle

I hate writing about this. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel after others have shot all the fish. But here goes.

Here’s all I know

The NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs—currently in the news for being Super Bowl–bound as well as for the fact that tight end Travis Kelce is dating musician Taylor Swift—are apparently participating in the most sinister conspiracy ever foisted upon an unwitting American public, if you believe social media’s least reputable yet highest-profile Trump-affiliated “influencers.” Many of them, including former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now pursuing his natural calling, argue in all purported sincerity that Taylor Swift is an “op.” Her success, apparently, is the product not of savvy branding and decades of work but rather of a series of shady agreements between her, the NFL, and George Soros to achieve peak crossover appeal right before she endorses Joe Biden in 2024.

National Review’s The Week for February 2.

But National Review’s readership may not be as high-caliber as once was rumored, because they then have to say the “needless to say” part:

Needless to say, the argument is absurd and reflects the combination of lunacy and cynicism of those promoting it. The response it has received among the grassroots, however—and, reportedly, among Trump’s staff—also reflects something much more consequential: Trumpworld’s well-founded anxiety that his unpopularity with young and even middle-aged women may be irreparable.

The underwhelming evidence

So far as I’ve heard (and I admit that I haven’t been paying very good attention), the only evidence that Taylor Swift is a liberal is that she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.

If it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could you turn your thoughts back to 2020 and try to remember who Joe Biden was running against?

Don’t you think it’s a stretch to think that one had to be a liberal to prefer Joe Biden over his 2020 presidential adversary?

At this point in the 2024 election, Republicans are running against themselves. Guys, the opponent is Biden, B-I-D-E-N. You have a really good chance against him. You will lose brutally against Taylor Swift.

Nellie Bowles
So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.

Two days post-caucus

Staying Sane in an Election Year

Matt and I are both fond of quoting Oliver O’Donovan here who once said that sometimes the sternest form of political judgment imaginable is to simply talk about something else.

There will be many, many attempts made this year to colonize your imagination. Cable news and political podcasts and morning radio and social media reactionaries will all be there, demanding your attention. Indeed, they will at times suggest that if you fail to attend to them then you will yourself somehow become complicit in the evils they are decrying.

Ignore them.

I am not saying to ignore politics, ignore public life, or adopt an above-it-all indifferentism to any of these things. We have already talked about how politics matter and how they provide one arena through which we can love our neighbors. Rather, I am telling you to refuse to participate in the sensationalizing spectacle of political discourse in an election year.

Instead, recall the advice of St Paul, who tells us to rejoice in all things and to pray without ceasing.

…

If you find that your heart is cold to the things of God but agitated and aggressive in response to political or cultural events, then it is probably a very good time for you to begin judging politics not by listening to news and forming opinions (which you then share loudly on social media) but rather by tuning out much of that news and spending time with God in prayer.

Indeed, we should remember that there are times where extreme action is required for the sake of our own soul: If Christ could tell his followers that there are menaces so great that plucking out your own eye is not to extreme a reaction, then I dare suggest that deleting social media apps from your phone or simply tossing your phone in the trash is, likewise, not too extreme an act.

Jake Meador, * Notes on Staying Sane in an Election Year*. This is most of just one note. There are several others.

And for many of us, myself included, this is terribly difficult advice to follow. I had to delete four items from this post to comply; I’m not sure how they got there since I keep reminding myself not to read about this stuff.

Stating the obvious

“In clinical diagnoses of gender dysphoria, on the other hand, psychosomatic complexity is acknowledged and followed by the recognition, initially upsetting though it may be, that someone who has a “deeply held sense” of alienation from their sexual biology is likely afflicted by a treatable form of mental illness.

To presume that the act of affirming forms of mental illness as normal is a legitimate form of treatment is not only incoherent; it also does more harm than good. Yet such normalization is how the ideology of progressivism, for better or ill, responds to social pathologies—it embraces them as expressions of individual volition, and pretends there is no harm done.

Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity (italics added)

Paideia

As Plato, Thucydides, and [] Toquerville have all observed, democracies prefer to look for material solutions to their spiritual problems. They never despair of making up the difference between the citizens desires and personal fulfillment with greater production or with a more equitable distribution of goods. Indeed, this is the reason for democracy’s basic optimism. But by the mid-1950s, it became clear that plenty was not solving the problem of inequality … Again, U.S. society turned to its schools … But because equal opportunity was viewed in terms of getting ahead or getting a job or “getting mine“ and not in terms of giving every person his due to an education that would enable him to reach his fullest human potential, the result was the lowering of academic standards to accommodate the week, indolent, or unmotivated students and the dismantling of the remaining paideia in favor of training for “marketable“ skills …

Putting aside our misgivings asked of the sagacity of imposing political objectives on the school, are we not still entitled to ask whether modern education has accomplished its utilitarian goals? Has it significantly added to American plenty and equality? I would argue at the secondary school level: no. Whatever gross additions it has made, they are neither significant in achieving the political objectives nor are they worth the infinite cost of depriving future generations of their rightful and necessary paideia. Our plenty — perhaps because we cannot imagine life without it — means nothing to us, while hiding from us the lavishly wasteful and destructive consequences of its production.

David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility

Why silence isn’t violence

There are more evil things going on in the world than any one person can respond to. You could spend all day every day on social media just declaring that you denounce X or Y or Z and never get to the end of what deserves to be denounced. If my silence about Gaza is complicit in the violence being done there, what about my silence regarding the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs? Or the government of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Or what Boko Haram has done in Nigeria? Or what multinational corporations do to destroy our environment? Or dogfighting rings? Or racism in the workplace? Or sexism in the workplace?

…

[P]ick your spots and pick them unapologetically. It’s perfectly fine for people to have their own causes, the causes that for whatever reason touch their hearts. We all have them, we are all moved more by some injustices than by others; not one of us is consistently concerned with all injustices, all acts of violence, nor do we have a clear system of weighting the various sufferings of the world on a scale and portioning out our attention and concern in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.

…

The silence-is-violence crowd, to their credit, don’t think that money is the only commodity we have to spend: they think we can and must spend our words also. And they always believe they know what, in a given moment, we must spend our words on. What they never seen to realize, though, is that some words are a debased currency. As the Lord says to Job, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” To speak “words without knowledge” is to “darken counsel,” that is, confuse the issue, mislead or confuse one’s hearers. The purpose of counsel is to illuminate a situation; one does not illuminate anything by speaking out of ignorance or mere rage. 

Alan Jacobs, Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition

Why the “far right” keeps moving

As Jon Askonas has recently argued in his essay “Why Conservatism Failed” (in Compact), the right has tended to embrace the forward march of technology, even while lamenting its solvent effects on everything one might wish to conserve. Conservatives have decried such phenomena as egalitarianism, feminism, or mass politics as though they were the wellsprings of social change, while downplaying the dependence of such ideologies on certain technological developments.

By the time Maistre wrote his polemics against science, democracy, and egalitarianism, the material transformations that enabled those moral shifts were well under way. Manufacturing was weakening feudal aristocracies in favor of a mercantile bourgeoisie with far more tenuous allegiances to land and tradition. Innovation replaced peasant workers with machines, undermining ancient powerbases in the process, and impelled millions to abandon rural life for the emerging industrial hubs. And this trajectory continued over the century that followed, notwithstanding Maistre’s tirades.

…

The right—by which I mean the constantly renewed rearguard action against the solvent effects of modernity—habitually defends large-scale political values whose moral force the technological revolution has already rendered insubstantial and abstract.

…

The directional quality of this endless revolution explains why it is so difficult to define the “far right.” A view is denoted as “far-right” relative to a revolutionary vanguard that is in constant forward motion, meaning that what is common sense today may read as right-wing extremism tomorrow. Thus do left-leaning feminists who defend embodied sex differences now find themselves accused of being “Nazis.” From the perspective of the technological revolutionary, any defense of immutable difference may be dismissed as, in Leidig’s phrasing, a “far-right narrative regarding essentialist gender roles.”

Mary Harrington, Reactionary Hope

Stolen valor

Delicious!

Harvard Extension School disavowed by its own professors: There’s a big problem. The conservative activist Chris Rufo went to night classes at Harvard’s Extension School, where he earned himself a master’s degree. And now he says he has a master’s degree from Harvard. Yikes. The New Republic writers—a group of Ivy League students with family money and also rage (I salute you, comrades!)—are upset. 

The Bat Signal was up. No stolen Harvard valor allowed at TNR. In order to jab Chris Rufo, Harvard Extension School professor Jennifer Hochschild decided to call her students idiots and say the school where she teaches is fake. She wrote: “Those students are great—I teach them—but they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students.” Tom Nichols, a Resistance celebrity who also teaches at Harvard’s Extension School, added simply: “Amen.” 

Indeed, the extension school is designed for nontraditional students; Columbia has a similar program, and it brought military veterans and older students into my college classes, which was wonderful. Anyway, Harvard Extension professor Hochschild has written books with titles like Facing Up to the American Dream and Bringing Outsiders In. What she really meant is that Bringing Outsiders In is bad and that “the hot chocolate bar is only for undergrads who pay full tuition.” I guess you didn’t read the book. 

Don’t be surprised if Harvard Extension School suddenly changes its website. Right now it says We Are Harvard and that you become a Harvard alum like any other. But with a little Chris Rufo Derangement Syndrome in the bloodstream, soon it will read: We are trash, and our alums are freaks. Georgetown University, where Rufo was an undergraduate, will soon announce that it is lighting its dorms on fire. It’s horrible what Chris Rufo makes us do.

Nellie Bowles

Recommended

Recommended, on Substack Nazis and other diversions: Shalom Auslander, The Jewish N-Word (Tablet Magazine).

Many naughty words. Tiny sample:

[M]y two ultra-Orthodox brothers-in-law have, between them, three times as many children as Substack has Nazis. It’s not even a [*******] minyan.

Miscellany

  • Nations have their ego, just like individuals (James Joyce via The Economist)
  • Polls are the reality TV of journalism. Drama draws eyeballs. Never trust them. Do the math. (Patrick Rhone, one of my most interesting social medium acquaintances.)
  • Hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave. (@verybadllama via Dense Discovery)
  • The joke is on you. I had a stroke. I can’t fully understand what you are saying. (Democratic Sen. John Fetterman responding to anti-Israel protester)
  • Pro-life is the ‘defund the police’ of the GOP. (Ann Coulter via Nellie Bowles)
  • Universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats. (The Rise of the Sectarian University)
  • Misogynoir: woke-speak for the double-whammy intersectional plight of black women.
  • This was their chance not only to burn a witch but to torch a coven … Conservatives would be the sun to Gay’s Icarus, demonstrating just how hot they could make things for her. (Charles Blow, in an otherwise predictably tone-deaf column about “the persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay.” My ideological adversaries can write very well on occasion.)
  • Sarah Palin was like John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s orange Jesus. (Carlos Lozado)

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.

On Claudine Gay’s plagiarism

A question at the back of my mind for a week or two has been “how serious was Claudine Gay’s plagiarism?” I brought it to front of mind within the past day or two, and I now have, serendipitously, a partial answer, which I now hasten to share.

My question arose from how her plagiarism was identified in the media, typically “verbatim copying” or “missing citations.” Someone even picked on her for “plagiarizing” acknowledgments.

Well, I’m no academic, so I won’t contest the consensus that what she did fits the academic concept of plagiarism. But what I did not read was any accusation that Gay was stealing other scholars’ ideas (not mere words, peripheral to the plagiarized articles’ scholarly thrust) and passing them off as her own.

And I now am presuming that she did not do so.

The turning point was a New Yorker interview by the estimable Emma Green, Why Some Academics Are Reluctant to Call Claudine Gay a Plagiarist.

Let’s be frank: some academics are reluctant to call her a plagiarist because of tribalism, the firestorm of accusations having come from a hostile and deplorable tribe (I’m still delighting in the insight — not my own — that education is the Right’s bugaboo as guns are the Left’s).

D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, acknowledges that tribalism, but is quite chill about Gay’s appropriation of some of his own academic words:

Was what Claudine Gay did plagiarism?

… yes, that’s technically plagiarism.

Why do you append “technically” to the front of “plagiarism”?

I use the analogy of speeding. If you’re driving fifty-seven miles per hour on a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway, that’s technically speeding. But we don’t expect law enforcement to crack down any time behavior crosses over the line. The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.

So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?

From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.

…

When I first was told that Claudine may have committed academic dishonesty at my expense, I took it seriously. I’ve had my work stolen before. So I didn’t rule it out. I immediately investigated what she used.

But the difference between plagiarism among academics and plagiarism in journalism or undergraduate papers is that what matters is less a few words or phrases and more the bigger scholarly ideas. Somebody could steal good ideas I had, write them up differently, and they’d have done serious damage to me. Whereas, if Claudine had borrowed three times as many words, but it was all in an unimportant part of the paper, that would have done me no harm. I’ve been stolen from in serious ways. What Claudine did was not it.

…

I’ve seen a number of academics trying to describe what Gay did as something other than plagiarism. A few weeks ago, for example, before Gay resigned, Harvard itself described her actions as using “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Why is it controversial to call what she did plagiarism?

It shouldn’t be controversial to call what Claudine did plagiarism. We teach students that it’s plagiarism all the time. But the problem with using language that’s customary within academic institutions in a public setting is that outsiders will warp what we say. The one phrase I’ve intentionally avoided using is “academic dishonesty.” Within an academic setting, plagiarism is an example of academic dishonesty. But if I’d said she committed academic dishonesty, that would have been warped and manipulated quite deceptively. So I avoided the term.

But why do you think that people don’t want to say the P-word? Why don’t they want to say “plagiarism”?

What happened to me in this controversy is the perfect illustration of why others have been avoiding the word “plagiarism.” My initial response was entirely supportive of Claudine. Yes, it was technically plagiarism, but this is no big deal. And then the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo plucks out the beginning of that sentence and says, Another scholar accuses Claudine Gay of plagiarism. Now, he didn’t lie. I did call it “plagiarism.” I hadn’t framed it as an accusation, but I guess the verb sort of fits. But he was able to get leverage out of something I said, taken out of context, that I then spent two days on Twitter rebutting. So, yeah, in retrospect, do I regret using the word “plagiarism,” given how it was exploited? Maybe.

Really? So you wouldn’t still call it “plagiarism”?

I’m calling it “plagiarism.” That doesn’t mean I didn’t regret it.

I’ve seen a lot of academics resisting the use of the word “plagiarism” because they say that the people who surfaced the allegations against Gay are part of a right-wing machine that wants nothing more than to take her down—allegedly because of her race or because they hate academia or because they want to undermine liberal institutions. What do you make of the argument that it’s worth resisting the frames that someone like Christopher Rufo comes up with to talk about what she did?

If the only way academia can fend off the Christopher Rufos of the world is by shifting their standards in an ad-hominem fashion based on who’s offering the attack, then academia has already lost the cultural battle. The clearer our standards, the more sure we are in what we believe in, the less it matters where a complaint or an attack is originating from. I reject the idea that an accusation that otherwise would have been taken seriously ought to be fended off because the bad guys are using it.

(Underlining added) Kudos to Emma Green for addressing my question rather than lazily focusing on Rufo’s chum along with the other sharks.

(Now, even more than before, I’m going to put an asterisk next to any accusation from Christopher Rufo, the asterisk signifying that it’s probably not an outright lie, but it’s highly likely to be tendentiously twisted.)

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.

Harvard (as synecdoche)

What we agree about

You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life. For at least ten years, and probably longer, it is likely that the state paid for you to be taught various subjects (like history, chemistry, literature, and so on) that are of no vocational value to the vast majority of its citizens. The state saw education as a public good in itself, a basic privilege that we expect all children to receive. So did your teachers. So do you. You might believe that state-funded education should become entirely skills-based at age sixteen. You might believe that taxpayers should fund doctoral studies for arts graduates. But you almost certainly believe that some measure of vocational irrelevance—learning things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons—is important to our intellectual and personal development and that we should all pay taxes in order to fund it.

This point is made powerfully in Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated. Born into a family of Mormon survivalists, she develops plenty of technical skills in her father’s junkyard but receives no formal schooling no formal schooling and arrives at university aged seventeen knowing nothing of Western art, and without having heard of the Holocaust. Her classmates, and we as readers, regard her as both inexplicable and tragically impoverished for her ignorance, and root for her to become educated, which she eventually does. In the process, we come to realize just how important we think education is, and how far we see learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World (hyperlink added)

The fatal mis-step

Issues of academic misconduct aside, I’d question the judgment of any university president who answers an invitation to argue with the likes of Stefanik. But Stefanik and Rufo did not write Gay’s dissertation, and they did not co-author her scholarly articles. Feel free to deplore the messengers, their vulturine creepiness, and their gleeful opportunism. Their own failings still do not make what they found any less true. In the real world, truth sometimes comes from terrible people with dishonorable motives; if we were to purity-test the motives of every defector who handed us documents during the Cold War, we’d have had to shred incredibly valuable information on the silly grounds that the people who gave it to us weren’t very nice.

…

Gay is not the first person whose scholarly work got another look because of sudden political notoriety. Back in 2001, for example, a professor at the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill wrote some ghastly things about the people who died in 9/11, including comparing the victims in the World Trade Center to the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. After this bravura jerkitude came to light, Churchill’s critics pushed for investigation into his published works, and in 2006, the university found that he had engaged in misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication. It dismissed him the next year.

Tom Nichols at the Atlantic

Jackals descend

When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu fell, everyone wanted to claim credit. It may be a mark of our decline that the poseurs are now claiming credit for the Gay resignation from Harvard.

Yes, that bad people make an argument from bad motives doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But this kind of posturing and preening turns my stomach anyway:

Rep. Elise Stefanik, taking a victory lap after the announcement of the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, boasted that this is “just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.” That is true if by “any college or university” you mean the 20 most famous institutions in the United States and if by “in history” you mean the past six months—if not, then surely Martin Heidegger’s Sieg-heil!-ing his way to the top at Freiburg University in the 1930s limbos right under the admittedly low bar set by Claudine Gay and her enablers at Harvard. But that is how Republicans talk—and think, if I may abuse the word—these days, “the fierce urgency of now” as seen from whatever is three flights of stairs down from the lowest gutter in Palm Beach.

Kevin D. Williamson

Rep. Stefaniak’s trolling question to the Ivy Presidents may have started the ball rolling, but that’s all the credit she gets. Christopher Rufo and Aaron Sibarium get far more — and like him, loathe him, or somewhere in between, Rufo’s a man with some plans.

Discernment needed

This entire saga may establish a new incentive structure for university decision-makers going forward. If you hire someone who does not meet the highest standards of academic rigor or who applies double standards on things like free speech and DEI, you know that they will be under tremendous scrutiny. You know that if the dirt exists, it will surface. So you have an incentive to be a little more discerning about who you elevate.

And if you are a university president, you certainly have an incentive to be more careful about political bias. Do you really want half the country rooting for your downfall? Do you really want that target on your back? In the shadow of Claudine Gay’s resignation, institutional neutrality may come to be seen as a safe harbor.

Aaron Sibarium, Free Beacon reporter who broke some of the news that broke Claudine Gay’s Harvard Presidency.

The Wicked Witch spins her demise

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.

Say whatever else you will about recently-resigned Claudine Gay, but don’t say she doesn’t read (and twist) Christopher Rufo.

Rufo would, indeed does , characterize his project at breaking up the Left’s hegemony in so very many of the nation’s cultural and educational institutions — decolonizing them, if you will — in order to restore public faith in them, not to “unravel” it.

Why Harvard did what it did

From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.

…

It’s to forestall that potential future [when elites will no longer see the Ivies as the default for their kids], not to reward the muckraking of conservatives, that Harvard presumably decided to sacrifice its plagiarist president. The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence. And Harvard’s critics can probably force more change the more that centuries-old power seems to be at risk.

Ross Douthat

How to get ahead in ed

The way to get ahead in economics, Robert Solow quipped, is to provide a “brilliant argument in favor of an absurd conclusion.” Has anything changed?… more »

Arts & Letters Daily, ~ 1/2/24

Yawn! That’s the way to get a PhD in almost any field any more. My personal experience with this was writing a law journal “Note,” which was to be an original contribution to legal thought, rather like a doctoral thesis. I glommed onto a church-state issue that was particularly on my mind in those days and, based on a dubious and thinly-supported premise, concluded … well, something I now think was foolish.

I frequently think that people with earned doctorates, over-invested in defending their indefensible theses, are a source of much evil in the world — particularly when those doctorates are in “theology.”

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

Saturday, 12/23/23

Smelling the Roses

I’ll turn too soon to less edifying thoughts, but let’s start with two observations, the first of which I practice while I mostly aspire to the second.

A little humanity

When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.

Tyler Austin Harper via Frank Bruni

The French difference

“The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly. “The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.””

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Segue

In the popular piety of the formerly-Christian West, Monday’s Feast is the equal of Easter, and it’s first runner-up to Pascha (Easter) in the Eastern Church.

So if you want don’t want it to be your “miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about ‘anti-democratic’ attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot” and similar things, you might want to stop reading now.

Politics and law

Of Rudy’s $175 million judgment and bankruptcy

I genuinely am curious who Trump could even staff a cabinet with. Literally everyone who comes near him is either publicly humiliated or impoverished through lawsuits and then also. . . publicly humiliated.

Nellie Bowles.

Suffice that they would not be our best people.

Regarding Colorado

Insurrection

January 6 qualifies as an “insurrection” even under a fairly narrow definition of the term that is limited to the use of force to take over the powers of government. We don’t need to rely on much broader definitions advocated by some legal scholars.

…

As our detailed recitation of the evidence shows, President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully under way, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.

…

As I pointed out in a recent Bulwark article about the case, this goes beyond encouraging violence (as Trump did before the attack) or failing to try to stop it. It amounts to using the attack as leverage to try to force Congress to keep him in power. Using a violent insurrection in this way surely qualifies as “engaging in it,” even if Trump’s other actions fell short of doing so. Even if this somehow still falls short of “engagement,” this and Trump’s other actions surely at least gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of the United States.

Ilya Somin, quoting the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling.

Don’t take the bait

You’ll find no shortage of arguments against the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump is barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving as President, and therefore will be barred from Colorado ballots.

I’ll not rehearse them here except to beg you: Don’t fall for the simplistic line that the decision is bad because it’s “anti-democratic.”

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was intended to be anti-democratic. It assumes that voters might elect an insurrectionist and says, in effect, “We don’t care. Insurrectionists can’t serve. Period. Full stop.”

Oh, yes: One more thing. It may be politically embarrassing that all seven Colorado Justices were appointed by Democrat Governors, but courts shouldn’t let political appearances sway them.

  • Somebody filed a lawsuit.
  • A lower court decided it and one side appealed.
  • From what I hear, the opinions and dissents in 213 pages of Colorado show great effort to get things right, not to carry partisan water or reject the cup handed them.

I wonder how SCOTUS will reverse? I strongly suspect it will. But the rationale will matter.

Our miserable fate

It’s our miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about “anti-democratic” attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot who were adamant about disqualifying Barack Obama in 2008 absent proof of his status as a natural-born citizen.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

Meritorious or not, challenging Trump on 14th Amendment grounds wasn’t tenable politically once he had reestablished himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Nick Catoggio

On the other hand

I bristle at criticism of the Colorado Supreme Court for having the temerity actually to decide a case presented to it without fear or favor.

But Nellie Bowles levels a different criticism, aimed at the people who brought the suit:

The only way to protect democracy is to end democracy: The Colorado Supreme Court decided this week that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency and so cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in the state. Meanwhile, California’s lieutenant governor ordered the state Supreme Court to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the ballot. In doing so, she said that the rules for the presidency are simple: “The constitution is clear: You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist.” Yet even there she is wrong: you only have to be 35. [Tipsy: You also have to be a natural-born citizen, Nellie.]

Anyway, for a long time the standard liberal take has been that Democracy Is Under Threat from Republicans. And Trump certainly tried schemes in Georgia and whatnot, like, the man gave it a shot. But I would say that banning the opposition party’s leading candidate. . . is pretty much the biggest threat to democracy you can do. It’s a classic one, really. Timeless. Oldie but Goodie. The American left was so committed to protecting democracy that they had to ban voting. 

All I’ll say is that once you ban the opposition party’s top candidate, you can no longer, in fact, say you’re for democracy at all. You can say you like other things: power, control, the end of voting, choosing the president you want, rule by technocratic elites chosen by SAT score, all of which I personally agree with. But you can’t say you like democracy per se.

So Colorado, listen, I dream every day of being a dictator. I would seize the local golf course and turn it into a park on day one; day two, expand Austin breakfast taco territory to the whole country; day three, invade Canada. Day four, we ban zoos. My fellow fascists, we’re on the same page. Let’s just drop the democracy stuff and call it what it is.

I’ve become persuaded that somebody ideally should have brought this sort of lawsuit years ago, when Trump wasn’t the GOP POTUS favorite by a commanding margin. But then most of us thought he was politically dead after January 6, so why would anyone bother?

“Eugenicons”

If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence.

Michael Lind

I spent a lot of time wading through Lind’s exposé of conservatives with eugenic sympathies, waiting for him to reveal the smoking gun. He never did.

I’m far from infallible on what’s going down in the world. I’m interested in what I’m interested in and within recent memory began consciously trying to forsake the fool’s errand of understanding everything.

That said, I’m not convinced that “eugenicons” (Lind’s failed attempt at coining a major concept) “have a large and apparently growing influence.” This felt like an article wherein the author got so invested in a theory that he couldn’t face up to its failure at his own hands.

Rank hypocrisy watch

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana was once perfectly content to use the courts to overrule a democratic process, spearheading an effort in late 2020 to collect lawmakers’ signatures in support of a lawsuit in Texas challenging the results of the that year’s election—which, if successful, would have voided millions of votes in four other states. Tuesday, though, Johnson—who formally endorsed Trump’s reelection campaign last month—was impugning the decision in Colorado that, in his view, would short-circuit the democratic process. “Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack,” he said. “Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. We trust the U.S. Supreme Court will set aside this reckless decision and let the American people decide the next President of the United States.”

TMD

Blood

It’s true; they’re destroying the blood of our country …

Donald J. Trump

All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.

Adolph Hitler

Assuming arguendo …

Let us assume for the sake of argument that there is an absolutely massive conspiracy of Democrats against Donald Trump.

Does that assumed fact make him fit for the Presidency? Are we going to elect a manifestly unfit candidate — one who either is ignorant of holocaust history or who consciously is mimicking Adolph Hitler — to punish the Democrats for some underhanded opposition to him?

I’m sorry that Americans are so well-conditioned that they won’t consider voting for third-party candidates, and that a vote against Trump effectively becomes a vote for Biden*, but I can’t vote for him and will probably vote for the American Solidarity Party slate.

(* A reminder that this common trope is sometimes false. We do not elect Presidents by national popular vote. I have several times now voted for third-party candidates when it was apparent from polling that, for instance, my state was going to deliver its electors to Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden, and my vote wasn’t going to change that.)

Culture

Real men, good men, violent men

Pearcey noted first that there is a sharp dissonance culturally between how we think of “real men” vs “good men.” The former are often moral abysses but they display a certain kind of chest-thumping bravado that many associate with masculinity. The latter is honorable, devoted, and principled, but often despised culturally for precisely those reasons, and this applies as much within many churches as it does the culture.

The other point she made: There is a sharp gap in behavior between self-identified evangelical men who don’t go to church (they are statistically the most likely group in most studies to engage in domestic abuse) and evangelical men who do attend church (statistically the least likely to be abusive). At a time when many in the young Christian right are making their peace with manosphere internet Nazis, those two facts fill me with dread. But we owe Pearcey a debt for helping to document not only these two points, but many others.

Jake Meador, * 23 Books for 2023*, recommending Nancy Pearcey’s * Toxic War on Masculinity*.

Dechurching

Meador also recommends The Great Dechurching by Michael Graham and Jim Davis.

There are many, many wrong ideas out there right now about the place of religion in American life: The dominant driver of dechurching is abusive churches. The most common intellectual shift in people who dechurch is toward progressivism. American churches are basically doing fine and the noise about dechurching is largely just a digital artifact, not something tied to life on the ground in local churches.

All of those things are wrong.

The reality is that the biggest drivers of dechurching right now are changes of life, above all moving to a new place. More people dechurch into a secular right wing ideology than progressivism. And the current dechurching wave is the single biggest shift in churchgoing practice in American history.

Graham and Davis will walk you through the data from the study they did with Ryan Burge and then offer application to help call people back to church. And that’s another misconception, by the way: Most people who have stopped attending church are actually willing to come back.

The persistence of religion

A common critical fallacy among liberals of most stripes is the affirmation that reasoned debate is the currency of politics. We want to believe that one simple Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart video will convince people that Pizzagate isn’t real or that Hilary Clinton doesn’t drink the blood of infants. The problem is pretending that logic, evidence, or reason have anything to do with such beliefs. The situation is much more dire, what we’re up against far more insidious; don’t expect to use logic when you’re at a Black Mass. “Everything may be religion,” I said, “but not all religions are good.” Irrationality, superstition, the numinous, and the transcendent—for both good and bad—can never be definitively pruned from our garden. You may as well pretend that language could be abolished as imagine the taming of the religious impulse, even when the aromatic censers of the church have been replaced by some weirdo’s keyboard.

Ed Simon

Simon also referred to Chris Rufo as a “Svengali opportunist.” I liked that very much. I distrust Rufo and have distrusted him since I first encountered him waging dishonest war on critical race theory. (Honest war on CRT is fine, but Rufo once boasted something like:

We’re going to render this brand toxic. Essentially what we’re going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory.

(Paraphrased from here.)

What’s even better than emission reduction?

Following up on this item, it occurs to me that mass disenthrallment with the automobile and a return to walking and cycling would be far better that reducing emissions from tailpipes or building overweight EVs that require a lot of mining of rare earths.

Exasperation speaking

“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”

“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”

Harvard Finds More Instances of ‘Duplicative Language’ in Claudine Gay’s Work – The New York Times

I assume Prof. Fried understands that truth is true regardless of who bears it, so I can only attribute this logical lapse to exasperation at Svengali opportunist Christopher Rufo.

When did foul language become invisible?

I occasionally see glowing reviews of some streaming series or another and wonder “why am I not watching that?” Then I go to the appointed streaming service and recall “Oh, yeah. I watched the first episode. It was so full of foul language that I couldn’t bear it.”

This is not a way of claiming that my own vocabulary is free of expletives, scatology, and occasional profanity. I adopted some of that stuff in my late teens and early twenties to shock my elders into recognition of their folly. Fifty-plus years later, that proto-trolling has proven one of my own lifetime follies.

My point is that foul language is invisible to most critics. There is a prominent Evangelical pundit, generally sound, who I’m nevertheless unable fully to trust because of how he raved about Ted Lasso without noting that its landscape was blanketed with F-bombs.

Saints and Sinners

[O]ne of the first things they teach you is that in the act of reporting, you will inevitably have to depend on information acquired from dodgy people. Saints, being saintly, often don’t know what’s going on; you have to talk to the people who are great sinners.

Rod Dreher

To salvage what’s left of the right’s faith in elections and the judiciary, and frankly to prevent civil unrest encouraged by Trump, the justices will need to reach a certain outcome in this matter regardless of whether they sincerely believe the law supports it. The Colorado Supreme Court accordingly may have viewed its own ruling as an opportunity to rebuke Trump constitutionally in a way that the U.S. Supreme Court won’t be able to, even if it’s privately inclined to do so.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

… Why, then, did his opponents wait so long to pursue this legal avenue against him?

Ironically, I think the answer is that they gave Republican voters more credit than those voters deserve.

…

As I explained previously, those voters have argued at varying times that it’s improper to impeach and remove him from office over January 6 because the criminal courts would punish him; that it’s improper for the criminal courts to punish him because voters would punish him; and that it’s improper if voters punish him because in that case the election must have been “rigged.” That’s the accountability vacuum. Many critics of the new 14th Amendment challenge to Trump’s candidacy have added another facet to it, that it’s improper to use the Constitution itself to punish him because to do so would be “anti-democratic.”

Nick Catoggio

I don’t know if Nick’s a great sinner and I’m a saint, but I’d like to think that SCOTUS doesn’t think that way, because it would mean, in practical effect, that the 14th Amendment Section 3 becomes unenforceable precisely when it’s needed — on the rationale that an electorate poised to elect an insurrectionist is capable of civil unrest at a level that trumps the law.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences. 

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

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 (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

  • Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
  • Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
  • Culture is more important than politics and economics.
  • A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
  • Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
  • Beauty is more important than efficiency.
  • The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
  • The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

More:

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’s Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

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

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Saturday, 12/16/23

The Ivies

The Homer Simpson theory of censorship

By the time I post this, America’s chattering class probably will have moved on to new clickbait [Note: I was wrong about that; they’re still writing about it.], but I thought David French was solid on the Ivy League Presidents’ notorious testimony to Congress:

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students …

[E]ach of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (I served as the group’s president in 2004 and 2005.) So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask: Where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

…

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents. With all due apology to Homer Simpson and his legendary theory of alcohol, it’s as if many campus critics view censorship as the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives, too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups that hold offensive views ….

The Right and Wrong Ways to Deal with Campus Antisemitism

Claudine Gay

[W]hen journalists discovered that [Harvard President Claudine Gay] had plagiarized heavily (even as she published very little before getting the job), Harvard hired a high-powered lawyer to bully those reporters. Several of the academics she plagiarized are not happy about it. And it does bring up questions of her actual credentials here—her biggest success before her appointment as president of Harvard seems to be as part of the mob that tried to smear Roland Fryer, a black professor there who poked some holes in common police racism narratives.

Nellie Bowles

Rhetorical flights of fancy

…

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that a representative survey at Harvard University would show that 51 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 found that the attacks by Hamas can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.

…

Mathias Döpfner, The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7.

This is but one of a list of Döpfner’s “I didn’t want to believes,” but its fallacy smacked me in the face. Isn’t “a representative survey at Harvard University” an oxymoron? Isn’t any survey at Harvard incapable of showing what Americans generally between ages 18 and 24 believe?

I think the author knows that:

And, more than anything else, I didn’t want to believe it was possible that some of the most renowned and influential elite universities in the world would capitulate to the cultural struggle carried out in the name of a woke agenda pushed by students that are increasingly demonstrating a blatantly antisemitic mindset ….

The ongoing treason of the intellectuals

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

Niall Ferguson, The Treason of the Intellectuals

Elites not fit for purpose

Rod Dreher, who went to LSU instead of an Ivy League school, has a more “meta” view of the débâcle:

What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose.

Dispossession

Stewardship as affront

Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack of stewardship that is the ethical core of a throwaway society, the visible presence of old cars represents quite the opposite. Yet these are easily conflated under the environmentalist aesthetic, and the result has been to impart a heightened moral status to Americans’ prejudice against the old, now dignified as an expression of civic responsibility.

…

Among the sacrifices demanded by the new gods may be your ten year old car that gets 35 MPG, requires zero new manufacturing (with its associated environmental costs), and may be good for another ten years. As Rene Girard points out, ritual violence is usually directed against a scapegoat who is in fact innocent, onto whom the sins of the community are transferred. In our pagan society of progress, it seems anything old and serviceable can serve this role.

Matthew B. Crawford.

I find it affirming that between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, Alan Jacobs posted the exact same selections from Crawford’s essay.

Chastity as atavism

Even many places that are inclined to be chill about private acts between adults balk at how far America is taking things. In America, tens of thousands of people cut off their breasts or genitals every year trying to change their sex. Judges tell parents they will lose custody if they don’t let their children be castrated. Rising STD rates among gay men have led the CDC to approve the continuous use of antibiotics as a prophylactic (DoxyPEP), even though this will surely result in antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Our birthrates are collapsing, and almost half of the children we do have are out of wedlock. There are lots of reasons other countries might look at us and think maybe we don’t have our sexual norms exactly right.

Helen Andrews via Rod Dreher

But leave a scrap

You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Miscellany

The New York Times

[T]he Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

James Bennet, former New York Times Opinion Editor, in the Economist. This is a 16,000-word essay on what has gone wrong at the Times — and how it went wrong.

A big factor is the intrinsic incentives of modern narrowcasting. The New York Times is prospering immensely, after a near-death experience, but it is prospering by telling liberals and progressives what they want to hear while pretending that it’s still an honest, unbiased source. So profitable is the new scam that the Times is unlikely to repent and go back to the old ways.

My decision to skip the Times “news” coverage and go straight to the Opinion pages — where I know I’m getting opinion and am unseduced by it — is vindicated.

Sundry madness

  • Barbara Furlow-Smiles, the woman whose title was Lead Strategist, Global Head of Employee Resource Groups and Diversity Engagement (i.e., head of DEI) at Facebook, pleaded guilty this week to defrauding the company of $4 million. A perfect symbol of these programs that literally the leader of it was very, very busy coming up with ways to steal millions from Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes it was just simple: she had Facebook pay $18,000 to a preschool for tuition, which, I love that, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. Other times, her scams were more elaborate. She hired friends for fake jobs and had them pay her kickbacks (dream of dreams). She submitted fake expense reports and such (oldie but goody). The kickbacks often came in cash, sometimes wrapped in t-shirts, according to the Feds (secure).
  • The Biden administration has decided to go after a random moving company for the crime of hiring too many muscular young men. Yes, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Meathead Movers, alleging age discrimination. There was no complaint that kicked this off, no elderly man who was turned out. The EEOC just decided to bankrupt this random company. The investigation started in 2017, but September 2023 was the moment to strike. Six years of investigating Meathead Movers. Maybe the CEO didn’t tweet enough nice things about Kamala Harris. Who knows. But moving companies beware: Are you hiring strong young men to carry things? Illegal! Go to a retirement home, find the tiniest elderly lady, and force her to haul a piano. That’s justice. That’s the EEOC. No one tell them about the NBA. 

Nellie Bowles

School as Industry

Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Counterculture

Lately to be countercultural is to be apophatic: untattooed, unbranded, unvideoed, unwebbed, uncontroversial, no takes, and genuinely nice to people.

@Jonah

Bill Bryson describes cricket.

Politics

Trump II

The warning Cheney issues is clear and persuasive: A second presidential term for Donald Trump would pose great risks to the nation’s democratic practices and identity. A retribution-minded, Constitution-terminating leader buttressed by unscrupulous advisers and ethically impaired lawyers could, she argues, “dismantle our republic.” As both a witness and a target of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and as a leader of the House committee that investigated the attack, Cheney recognizes the power of the mob that Trump commands. She also understands the cowardice of his enablers in the Republican Party, the same kind of loyalists who would populate — or at least seek to justify — a second Trump administration.

Carlos Lozado

Vivek!

I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.

Frank Bruni. Bruni also gives a shout-out to Sarah Isgur:

  • [I]n The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’”

The funny thing is, Isgur did not say that. What she said was “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘asshole.’” The Times censored it.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Saturday, 12/2/23

A comment about my less-frequent blogging.

I’ve resumed, for several months now, use of my (digital) Journal and Common Place Book to collect many of the items I find amusing or that confirm my biases. A relative few of them I also still blog, along with items I judge are of more general interest than what gets logged only privately. That’s why I’m posting less total volume of material.

As this blog’s free for the taking, I don’t apologize, but wanted to explain.

Politics

The people

Character is destiny

Trump will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the “quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the beginning of all this, character is destiny.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Chuck Schumer’s Sister Souljah moment

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish official, gave a roughly 40-minute speech on the Senate floor Wednesday condemning the antisemitism that has exploded across the United States following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, calling it “a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.” The address, aimed largely at those on the political left, called out progressives who celebrated Hamas’ brutal attack and repeatedly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. “Many Jewish Americans fear what the future may bring, based on the repeated lessons of history,” he said. Meanwhile, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to appear before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5 to give testimony regarding antisemitism at their respective institutions.

TMD

The parties

Tone-deaf lefties

Voters want to hear how problems can be solved—not told they’re doomed unless obviously impractical steps are taken. And it doesn’t help that the Left’s version of the steps that must be taken includes a raft of unrelated social programs that would be nice to have but don’t do anything about climate change (see, for instance, the Green New Deal proposed in Congress). Nor does it help that obviously necessary components of a clean energy program like nuclear power are ruled out because, well, people on the Left don’t like nuclear power.

Ruy Teixeira, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

The dynamics of Left and Right

[W]e’re just really confused how people are not acknowledging that the democrats are just as in bed with corporate and pharmaceutical interests as republicans … I don’t know enough about psychology to say for sure why this has happened. Why when finally, finally, the Republicans are saying, “Woah, looks like the police are sometimes racist. We do need police reform!” the left had to then go, “Reform? Who said anything about reform? We need to defund the police!”… The truth is that neither party represents working class Americans. And these supposed “socialists” – what are they running on? Free college and banning fracking. It’s maddening.

Highly Qualified: What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?.

This is from some Readwise highlights. I have no memory of who linked to the original enticingly enough to get me there. I swear I’m not a regular at The Dandy, which appears to be for upstate New York elitist pot-heads.

Epigraph or epitaph?

When the history of this era is written, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about” should be its epigraph.

Nick Cattogio, quoting equivocally Anti-Trump Chris Sununu.

How reticent Republicans will come around to Trump

One of the shining lessons of the past eight years is that however low your expectations might be for Republican voters, they’re not low enough. Most of those on the right who should know better but have stuck it out this far will get to “yes” on Trump 2.0, I suspect. Some might do so after determined efforts at self-persuasion, but most will back Trump without much strain.

There are various rationalizations to which they’ll turn to resolve the tension between their nagging fear that Trump is a poisonous threat to America’s civic heritage and their partisan duty to believe that government by the far right is preferable to government by the far left—and that every Democrat is supposedly a member, or a puppet, of the far left. Those rationalizations are a strange brew of magical thinking and hard-nosed “binary choice” partisan logic.

…

[A] Republican-controlled Congress would either tolerate or actively enable Trump’s power grabs in a second term, the same way that congressional Republicans tolerated or actively enabled his aggressive deficit spending during his first term. We are very late in the game for anyone to still pretend that the GOP cares about restraining the federal government whenever they’re in charge of it, but that’s the sort of silliness in which one must indulge to imagine reelecting Trump as some sort of civic good.

Nick Cattogio

Mis-judging what “real Americans” want

Follow me for what is going to long like a sudden left turn: Do you know why the Republicans’ bad reputation on racial questions is a problem for the GOP politically? It isn’t because it costs them among black voters—it is because it costs them among white voters, of whom there are a whole lot more, many of whom do not wish to associate themselves with a party that is known (not without reason) for harboring politicians and activists with ugly and atavistic racial attitudes. These same voters—many of whom would be more or less on board with traditional Republican economic policies—are put off by other characteristics of the GOP coalition: its anti-intellectualism, its rural orientation, etc. That isn’t to say that everybody in the Republican Party is a rube on a turnip truck—but if you see a bunch of rubes piled into a turnip truck, you can bet that the turnip truck is going to have a “Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President!” bumper sticker on it. It isn’t going to say “Biden-Harris 2024.”

The Democrats have wisely offered themselves up as the natural political home of those upwardly mobile urban-suburban professionals the Republican Party doesn’t want. The Martin Center’s main man George Leef can sneer at the elite universities three times a week in the pages of National Review, but there is a great many young Americans who very much would like to attend one of those universities, and a great many middle-aged Americans who would like their children to attend such a school and who care a great deal about who gets in and why. But, even among people for whom Harvard’s admissions standards are not an immediate and urgent issue, the question remains: Do you want to associate yourself with the Ivy League crowd and the upwardly mobile strivers, or with the sneerers and scoffers who (though college-educated themselves, of course!) want you to believe that there’s a bright future in bumpkinism?

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Republicans have spent the past 15 years or so micturating from a great height upon the aspirations of people who might want (for themselves or for their children) an Ivy League education, a high-paying job in technology or finance, a nice home in Silicon Valley or New York City or another big metropolitan area—in cities and suburbs that may not comport exactly with their politics on the whole but which offer (to everyone who is not a political monomaniac) many other important benefits, from economic opportunity to cultural interests to superior health care facilities. “Real Americans,” Republicans insist, do not aspire to such things—all Real Americans want to be farmers in Muleshoe, Texas, and diesel mechanics in Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Kevin D. Williamson

(Williamson suggests that the Democrats, too, are following policies apt to alienate strivers, but the Republican transmogrification is easier to caricature.)

So glad he solved that

How about it doesn’t matter whether progressives are liberals? We must move beyond the old labels. We are separated by rationalists and irrationalists.

What was once liberal is simply (as it mostly always has been) common sense, common decency, and management of inevitable change for the benefit of the general welfare and liberty and justice for all. Basically, what any reasonable and broad view of society would see as doing the right thing.

Almost anyone’s reading of social and political history would agree that we live in a better, more decent and fair nation because of the right things that rationalists did: abolish slavery, rein in the robber barons, establish labor laws, and approve women’s suffrage, civil rights, voting rights, Social Security and Medicare. The right things to do, which the irrationalists opposed.

In this new century social attitudes have changed, geopolitical power has changed, technology has exploded, the climate has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need and desire to do the right and decent thing. And there is only one side that continues that fight.

When we finally pull our heads above the surface of the water we’re swimming in, we might see that there is no longer a divide of right and left, red and blue, liberal and conservative; it’s one simply of right and wrong. Rationality vs. irrationality.

Mansplaining Texan’s letter to the New York Times

I read this as “Let’s do away with an imperfectly nuanced political spectrum in favor of this useless but self-flattering binary.”

Foreign follies

“Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

Culture

A brutalizing and stupid idea

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

A Matter of Principle

Less than a decade ago, I had high regard for “conservative” Hillsdale College. Its hiring of Michael (“Flight 93 Election”) Anton, who is at it again, together with the populist, rabble-rousing tone of its mailings, have brought that high regard to an bitter end.

Nevertheless, I’m in Hillsdale’s corner on this pernicious lawsuit. Hillsdale accepts no federal aid, but left activists, acting in the name of two co-eds who allegedly were acquaintance-raped by two Hillsdale men, are trying to impose Title IX processes on Hillsdale or else strip it of tax exemption.

SCOTUS sowed bad seed when it let the IRS strip Bob Jones University of tax exemption because of its odious policies on race. This is going to be a battlefront in the Left/Right wars for some time to come (and I have little doubt that the Right will try a tit-for-tat attack on some leftish nonprofits).

EA

Defined in these broad terms, effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?

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This is why EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals. (This would seem to require a belief that prey animals dying of disease and starvation is superior to dying from predation, but ah well.) … [T]hose examples are essential because they demonstrate the problem with hitching a moral program to a social and intellectual culture that will inevitably reward the more extreme expressions of that culture. It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.

Freddie deBoer, The Effective Altruism Shell Game

Fox Porn

From my point of view, the case against Fox News isn’t that it is dangerous or that Tucker Carlson’s work is likely to incite anybody to violence. (Maybe it will, but I doubt it. This country may generate a few school-shooters every year, but I don’t think it has the energy for a sustained intifada.) The case against Fox News is that it is tedious, repetitive, and lurid. Aesthetically and emotionally, it more often resembles pornography than it does, say, the commentary of Paul Harvey.

Kevin D. Williamson (paywall)

They voted their lying eyes

We disagreed—and still do—with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism. 

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration. 

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they—the public—had not been adequately consulted.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus, The Death of the Old Europe—and the Rise of the Right

The horseshoe theory of politics

[Marx and Engels] write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical …

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter.

Alan Jacobs, Conceptual Marxism

The expiration of small-c conservatism

London has become its own country in a way, leaving the hinterlands further behind, its elites still gnashing their teeth about Boris and Brexit, while picking at their octopus starters. The prime minister is Hindu, the mayor of London is Muslim, and the first minister of Scotland is Muslim. The abandoned husks of churches contrast with the bustle of new mosques. This is a Britain unlike anything before.

And some of it clearly works: close your eyes and listen to young non-white Brits on the buses or trains, and all the accents and slang are instantly recognizable from my youth. The humor is still rich. Civility is fraying but still there. Crime is nowhere near American levels. The new Elizabeth underground line is marvelous. A city with the cultural cohesion of the Heathrow departure lounge somehow hangs together. The Brits are still a nation of high-functioning alcoholics and retain their strange, hysterical aversion to cannabis. It’s a miracle of multicultural harmony, but you can feel its internal tensions rising.

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And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

Andrew Sullivan

Another new category for this blog

I once fancied that racism in the classic “dark people are inferior to light people” sense had largely vanished from the U.S. I conceded that racial stereotypes remained, but thought that even those fled in the face of a nicely-dressed darker person who spoke standard English — someone like, say, Thomas Sowell, Condoleeza Rice, or Barack Obama.

Birtherism and other bizarre attacks on said Obama persuaded me that I had been mistaken. People weren’t calling him [racial epithet omitted], but something dark and atavistic was afoot. Maybe I need to get out more.

I was less naïve about antisemitism, but it has so shamelessly reared its ugly head since October 7 that I’ve added it as a “category,” appearing today for the first time as such (earlier blogs no doubt had it as a “tag”).

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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