Category: Education

Somehow waiting for Something

Somehow waiting for something.

I find right now it can be hard to speak about anything going on in the world: it’s all moving so fast, very little seems clear, and there is a strange indefinable sense that we are all somehow waiting for something.

Paul Kingsnorth

I suggest we’re waiting for two tangled somethings:

  1. See whether, and how, and how radically, AI shakes up the world as we’ve known it.
  2. See if the tech sector bubble (AI market valuation collectively has reached $27 trillion) bursts and worry #1 flees like a dream in the night.

With all the buzz and confidently-voiced narratives, it’s easy to forget that AI has not yet been profitable, and may never be profitable, but is up to its eyeballs in debt or in equity that likely never will generate enough free cash flow to justify it.

Running on steroids

It was on Wall Street that Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old co-founder of Kalshi, was inspired to start a prediction-markets exchange. As an intern at hedge funds such as Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, she was baffled to find fund managers building elaborate portfolios to take positions on forthcoming elections and interest-rate decisions. Kalshi’s users bet directly on events instead. “What we are building is a financial exchange where anyone from a Robin Hood trader to Goldman Sachs to someone in an MIT dorm could trade directly in what their thesis was about the future,” Ms Lopes Lara says.

Among amateur traders, prediction markets have taken off. Everyone from students to delivery drivers seems to be having a flutter. Kalshi processed $33bn of trades in June, according to the Block, a data provider. Its main rival, Polymarket, did $10.7bn on its crypto-based international exchange, plus $3.3bn on its regulated American version. These are tiny sums next to those on big derivatives exchanges. But they are growing fast (see chart). Kalshi and Polymarket are reportedly fundraising at valuations of $40bn and $15bn.

The Economist. I’m pretty certain I’ve voiced by hatred of gambling, and gambling apps, and perhaps even Kalshi and Polymarket by name. But I confess to not having connected them to what was already going on at hedge funds.

Our “healthy” economy is running on steroids and crack even beyond what I thought. For “hedge funds” are available only to accredited and institutional investors (who can afford getting hosed) while Kalshi and Polymarket are available to any random chud. That democratic gesture bodes ill for just about everyone but the owners of Kalshi and Polymarket.

Barbarian art-destroyers

Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment; it was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country. “Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Mature enough for the humanities

I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?

Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.

The adults were more impressive than the college students.

Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.

Ted Gioia

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

Kevin D. Williamson, who I’ll read even when he’s writing about a movie I don’t plan to see.

Elena Kagan

I keep and regularly review a list of my truly unpopular opinions — not the edgy things one says or write in hopes of being thought courageous, but the things one dare not say or write in the current milieu.

This is not one of them, though it may be a bit edgy in “conservative” (whatever that term means after ten years in the Trumposcene) circles: Justice Elena Kagan is more than just one of three “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court. She is a diplomat, with stratospheric emotional intelligence, who managed to make conservative students feel welcome at Harvard Law and not infrequently attended Federalist Society meetings. When I hear discussions of SCOTUS decisions, I frequently wonder how Justice Kagan shaped them behind the scenes.

I’ll likely be gone before she is, but I suspect she will go down in history as one of the most consequential justices of the court — top decile at least.

UPDATE: On Tuesday the 28th, Josh Blackmun conveniently published this brief piece on Justice Kagan, which harmonizes well with my view of her.

Mission Creeps

Amnesty International, which once “enjoyed a reputation for defending prisoners of conscience and upholding human rights for all,” appears to be succumbing to succumbing to mission creep.

This has been most clearly demonstrated by Amnesty International UK’s publication on July 8 of a report called “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.”

The report branded more than 100 groups as “anti-rights,” including 51 that are dedicated to protecting the freedoms of women and gay people but are dismissed as “gender critical.” The common characteristic of these organizations is that they acknowledge the fact that human beings cannot change sex and that the rights of women and gay people are underpinned by a recognition of biological sex differences. This is apparently sufficient to see them condemned.

Andrew Doyle, Amnesty International UK vs. J.K. Rowling

I’m pleased to see that the push-back is strong.

Get over yourself, JD

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel criticized Vice President JD Vance’s absenteeism from the Senate, where he is ex officio Senate president. His enforcers came down hard on her:

  • uniparty mouthpiece
  • billionaire lackey
  • corrupt
  • liberal
  • Marxist
  • deep state
  • captive tool
  • liar
  • establishment
  • RINO

She responds:

Can Mr. Vance possibly think this is smart? Successful politicians seek to find new allies, not to alienate longstanding ones, whether elected colleagues, interest groups, the entrepreneurial class or conservative media. Winning is hard enough without a right-on-right cage match. One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. If he wants to be president, he’ll need to get over that.

But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his “national conservative” ambitions for the GOP aren’t landing. Republicans are increasingly up in arms over a Vance agenda that sounds like Bernie Sanders. Hence his Vance team’s need to invalidate anyone who disagrees as a “RINO” or a “tool” of special interests or an “elite”—the better to allow them to define what counts as a “real” Republican. A Vance Republican.

Here’s an idea: Make the argument instead. And maybe let others make theirs, too—free of the gaslighting.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by JD Vance

I was reading Rod Dreher when he “catapulted JD Vance into fame.” Understandably, considering what followed, Dreher and Vance remain close. But even Rod, because he actually cares for Vance, with skin in the game, has written some critical things.

I once cared moderately for Vance, thinking he might reprise the role of Mike Pence. I care for him a little less every week.

Shorts

  • From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. … In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed. (The Economist)
  • It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. (David Brooks)
  • Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (L.M. Sacasas. This is a periodic, pithy gut-check. It evokes a lot.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Solstice Eve

The University As We Know It Is Finished

Nils Gilman, The University As We Know It Is Finished strikes me as a pretty good overview of what AI means to “the University as we know it.” I’ve been a bit disappointed with my subscription to Persuasion, but this makes up for a lot of boring articles.

I’ve long (always?) been ambivalent about the University as we know it. I’ve been under the impression that the “Oxbridge” way of educating surpasses even our most exclusive and competitive universities. I’ve lamented the tentacles of the military-industrial complex extending into our science and engineering colleges. I cynically am tempted to think of universities as nothing more than credential factories (except for the bit that’s drunken whorehouse).

The new reality surely will be different. I hope it will be better. If it is, I don’t see how it will avoid shrinking down to fit the relatively few young citizens who can actually knuckle down and grapple with the great and perennial issues of mankind. I’m kind of worried about the value of my fractional ownerships of student housing apartments.

But I’m kind of excited, despite my inner Eeyore, about what may emerge after what promises to be tumultuous and probably rapid change. Although I’m too conservative temperamentally to tear things down from any instinct that the replacement couldn’t be worse (see Damon Linker on that, in Shorts below), I can watch events beyond my control tear things down with equanimity if I catch a whiff of a better replacement.

A golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks

From Sara Hendren, writing about selective abortion — or is it about a “golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks”? You decide.

The occasion of Sara’s story is the pregnancy of an influencer couple, followed by selective abortion for Down syndrome, chronicled in real time as influencers are wont to do.

It has been said that the line between “influencer” and other people making money by writing on the internet is that the influencer is hawking brands.

I had internalized “influencer” as a pejorative for certain shallow content. But that just pushes the distinction question back another step — what kind of shallow content typifies the “influencer”? Maybe it really is brand-hawking.

“Turtles all the way down,” as they say.

Anyway, Sara is a smart lady, one of several super-smart cyberfriends on my cherished social medium, micro.blog. She writes frequently many places, but one of them is Comment, to which I subscribe but which I’ve been neglecting if favor of ephemera. I’m going to try to change that – and if I spend more time there, less in ephemera, that will change the tone of this blog as well.

A philosopher muses on his life thus far

Another regular at Comment is James K.A. Smith, a well-regarded philosopher about whom I’ve been somewhat ambivalent for reasons I needn’t go into. Suffice that it’s pretty stale, I’ve only heard the other side, he’s changed, and he may have outgrown my little beef with him, because he’s trying mightily to change:

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twentysomething self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning—arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison.

…

I organized my life around something like this vision. Coinciding with a religious conversion, my path to philosophy was paved with polemic and fuelled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago, I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation.

…

The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardour of the religious apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. I’m a philosopher and I’m here to help. Stand back: I know things. We can think our way out of this mess. Now here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, in the (late) middle of a life, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind. Or whether that’s even the point. As a philosopher, I’m learning how to wonder again. But before I could imagine another way to be a philosopher, I had to recognize that, first, a lot of change needed to take place in me.

James K.A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Some unexpected reality of working with AI

I recognize a lot of what Lila Shroff, America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek is talking about:

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

…

Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.”

…

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work.

The difference between my experience and these coders is that I was working on just a single project, in a chat, with no agents deployed to work in parallel (and nag me with questions). Nevertheless, I needed frequent breaks. That’s probably in part because of my age entering this strange new world.

And I’ve gotten the yellow flag, too – a reminder of AI’s limits. Not hallucinations, but “wasted” time.

The project that wore me down with Claude’s followup was some preliminary legal work for a nonprofit corporation that needs to reorganize because of exponentially increased assets. Because I relinquished my law license in 2018, and because corporate law was never my focus, I eventually called a CPA and a Lawyer about advising me (I was hoping my Claude work product might just need review), and basically learned that Claude and I collectively had missed some key distinctions, mostly on the accounting and tax status side (there are many different nonprofit tax statuses, all “tax exempt,” many “tax deductible,” but with differences that we need to nail down to do it the right way). Now maybe Claude asked questions about that, but I don’t think so.

I don’t really view my useless work product as wasted time: I’ve learned a fair amount about what AI is good for — and some of its limits.

Presidents

Overestimating the Boss

Last June, when Vice President JD Vance was defending Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s single-day strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance said, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”

“I understand the concern,” he continued, “but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Is that so?

The evidence of unreasonable pride is everywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had too much confidence in his ability to persuade Trump. For his part, Trump had too much confidence in his ability to bully Iran.

And so it turned out that the “dumb presidents” understood reality far better than Trump. There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to destroy your opponent, you’re going to have to use immense force. If you’re going to compromise with your opponent, it’s best not to lose a war (or blink in the face of adversity) as a prelude.

But Vance’s pride reveals a deeper problem. By scorning their predecessors, Vance and Trump are far too ready to reject their achievements. Trump was eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and risk squandering victories against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by tearing up the Iran deal without a viable replacement (and then launching an ineffective war), he may end up helping create a more radical, more powerful and more dangerous Iran.

In their arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu defied their predecessors in all the worst ways, and now they court a profound defeat when, not long ago, a meaningful victory, however partial, was well within their grasp.

David French

He thought he’d seen the ne plus ultra of demagoguery

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word plan 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry’s pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan—nay, a promise-to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Of course, this book was published two years before Trump rode down that escalator, and the columns collected there were earlier than that.

Re-evaluating 44

I never voted for him (his political record was far further left than his smooth speechifying would make you think), but I thought the election of Barack Obama said something good about America, and I appreciated the dignity he maintained in office (especially in retrospect).

But his execrable, brutalist Presidential Center makes me think he’s worse than I thought. The only thing that could make it worse would be gold leaf.

The Tell

9. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth berated NATO allies as “shameful” for their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting on Thursday that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result. He repeated President Trump’s previous description of the military alliance as a “paper tiger” and warned that U.S. support to NATO would not be “a one-way street.” Mr. Hegseth’s 12-minute lecture cast a chill over a meeting that had been designed to set a collaborative agenda for a summit of NATO leaders next month. He scolded allies whom he described as having failed to step up their defense spending, as the alliance agreed to do last summer, under pressure from Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hegseth reserved his harshest remarks for countries that had resisted letting American jets or ships use bases in Europe on their way to attack Iran during the war that the United States and Israel initiated Feb. 28. (Source: nytimes.com)

John Ellis News Items for June 19

Be it remembered that when we want to poo-poo Russian concerns about Ukraine getting too thick with Western Europe, and maybe even joining NATO, we insist that NATO is “purely defensive.” But under Trump, we’re treating NATO as our ally, obliged to aid us in the prosecution of a war he started without asking Congress, let alone our NATO partners, before commencing our attack.

Hungary under Orbán

Viktor Orban was not against liberal democracy; the Fidesz-drafted postcommunist constitution was and is a liberal democratic document. What Orban opposed was the post-national, post-Christian version of liberal democracy. Orban was able to do things politically that would not be constitutionally permitted in the US, in terms of promoting Christian values explicitly in law and policy. But he was able to do other things too, like offering super-generous subsidies to encourage Hungarians to have bigger families.

…

Hungary under Orban was an important experiment. Now Hungary is just one more small, godless European country.

Rod Dreher

Caveat: Dreher’s column starts with a different story than Orban and Hungary — the kind of story I wish he wouldn’t write since I really cannot do anything about Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Great Britain.

Shorts

  • [Trump] has now crested 80, and as our news-side colleague Katie Rogers wrote this week, that bothers him intensely. He may soon get a midterm comeuppance. Then the clock on his presidency starts ticking more and more loudly. Imagine the self-tributes he’ll need as medicine for all of that. We can file them under octogenarian onanism. (Frank Bruni)
  • “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” (Huck Finn via Bret Stephens)
  • Put it this way: Vance’s book is about how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards. (Alexandra Petri)
  • Even Jimmy Carter didn’t agree to be taken hostage. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • State Department official John Negroponte drolly observed after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.” A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. (Graeme Wood on the Iran MOU)
  • It is simply not a reasonable thing to respond to disliking the government of Country A by proposing that we attempt to remove the government of Country A in the hopes that whatever government that follows will be more to our liking. (Damon Linker)
  • “It’s very funny that ten years ago beltway chickenhawks adopted an unachievable phony demand to justify opposing the JCPOA, Trump didn’t realize it was fake and fought a war to get it, discovered it was unachievable, and is now giving the chickenhawks the worst day of their lives,” – Max Fisher. Karma. (Via Andrew Sullivan
  • “FFS… please stop forcing professional athletes to wear rainbow hats and jerseys in June. It’s not helping,” – Dan Savage (via Andrew Sullivan. Bravo!
  • Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I’m doing the best I can here. If I could literally rub Trump voters’ noses in it while beating them with a rolled-up newspaper, I’d, ummmmm, consider it.

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

Jonah Goldberg

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

Who less than self their country loved

Congressmen and Senators reveal their real preference …

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

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

… and a South Carolina state Senator reveals his

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

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

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

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

A new phase in MAGA loyalty to Il Duce

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

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

That’s the Jonestown phase …

Nick Catoggio

Mark Edmundson’s father was a mensch

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

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

David Brooks, Something Is Going Right at Universities

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

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

SCOTUS blog

(Cf. Matthew 22:15-22)

War without a human face

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

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

Does this tell you what you need to know?

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

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

Nancy French, Ghosted

AI Poetry

Katha Pollitt writing for the Nation, May 12:

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

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

Via the Wall Street Journal

Eighth Day Books’ Warren Farha

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

Warren Farha, RIP

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Saturday, 4/25/26

The Right Way to Talk About War

What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.

You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.

Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.

We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?

This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.

If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?

While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.

Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.

Peggy Noonan (shared link).

Why left-hemisphere dominance?

With apologies to Emerson, why is the left hemisphere in the saddle, riding mankind?

I think [the left hemisphere’s] success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. … Third, the left hemisphere is also … the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning.

Every of those four points distills hundreds of pages from McGilchrist’s very much larger works. But because of some other things I read recently that haunt me, the final one has created one of my exciting moments where I (silently) exult “Oh! That meshes with these other points! I’ve almost got it now: the grand unified theory of how everything works!”

Here’s one of the other thing I read:

We are discovering, for example, that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

L.M. Sacasas.

I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, McGilchrist’s final point about “the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally,”

The other thing I read (actually, heard and transcribed) was this:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist.

My frustration with headstrong Protestants briefly led me off into thinking that, the Reformation having been midwifed by the left hemisphere, Protestants today remain too left-hemispheric.

I still think so, but then I realized that Protestantism never sits still — that the charismatic renewal of the 60s and 70s, and the happy-clappy guitar-and-drum assemblies of today, just might be human beings wittingly or unwittingly trying to counter-balance their left hemispheres.

I have learned to prefer icons, incense, fasting, feasting, eucharist and apophaticism generally to such ersatz, but à chacûn son gout.

More reasons to discipline yourself to spend more time attending to your world in a right-hemispheric way.

Learning to attend in an LLM world

Rules produce compliance. Distinctions produce discernment. Digital platforms are engineered to collapse that discernment. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, and for frictionless fulfillment. The tech arrives dressed as toys.

In an operating room, no one bans scalpels. Nor does a surgeon treat them casually. Instead, there’s a ritual: scrubbing in. The scrub-in isn’t merely about hygiene. It’s a cognitive threshold. It marks a passage from ordinary space to consequential space by establishing the sterile field: a bounded space of deliberate intervention where carelessness is as much the enemy as contamination. It means recognizing that environments carry risks and risks require care ….

…

[S]tudents don’t need prohibitions enforced by administrations, but disciplined practices modeled by adults; they need to learn to “scrub in” for the classroom. That means leaving things behind as well as bringing things in, not only in terms of the materials students bring to class but also the attitudes and sense of purpose as well.

In my own classes, this can be as simple as examining the threshold. At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do. 

My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it.

Justin Neuman, Scrubbing In.

Neuman’s students are lucky to have such a thoughtful teacher, and he’s lucky to have students with the seriousness not to take governing their attention as a total joke.

If that’s actually happening, that is. Alan Jacobs doubts that it is, and focuses on pen-and-paper instruction.

Trump

Hereditary power

Nick Catoggio suspects that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance will both get straight-armed in 2028:

From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing, family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.

…

You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.

Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well. Dramatically.

Nick Catoggio, The Son Also Rises, speculating about Donald Jr. in 2028.

Why would a smart young conservative work for Trump?

After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.

One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.

Nick Catoggio, However Much You Admire Danielle Sassoon, It’s Not Enough (February 14, 2025)

Why I’d like for the GOP to lose the Senate this Fall

In my first draft of this sub-post, I indulged in some political wool-gathering about my current personal political proclivities. I decided to spare the world from slop that doubtless is more fascinating to me than it’s likely to be to anyone else.

But one thing stood out as worthy of publication:

Of course, the Supreme Court poses the highest stakes of all. The two oldest justices are Trump’s most reliable stalwarts, Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76. CBS News reports that neither plans to retire in 2026, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cajoling them to step aside.

Elie Honig, Trump Seems to Be Planning Ahead for Losing the Senate. I don’t necessarily agree that the Court is “the highest stakes of all,” but it’s pretty important.

I hope neither Alito nor Thomas succumbs to Trump’s cajoling. Next, I don’t want either justice to die between this Fall’s election and Inauguration Day 2028, but if that should happen, I’d want Democrats in control of the Senate to force Trump into nominating someone well-enough qualified to gain a few Democrat votes for confirmation.

I don’t think we have any political hacks on the Court currently — neither Republican nor Democrat — but with Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump could nominate Emil Bove or John Eastman or the winner of the Kentucky Derby (the equine, not the jockey) and the Senate would confirm him (the filibuster for SCOTUS justices having been abolished). Having already trashed the Department of Justice with political hacks, putting political hacks on SCOTUS would set us back years further in the steps to post-Trump recovery.

Will Trump shoot himself in the foot again?

[I]t was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

Ross Douthat (emphasis added)

Breaking the trolling cycle

Be honest. Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.

Bari Weiss

Shorts

  • We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands. (Jacob Imam, founder of the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, OH, where students get a liberal arts degree and trade training, graduating debt-free.)
  • Jonathan Dupiton, host of the Rich and Unemployed podcast, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a $3.8 million unemployment fraud scheme. Turns out the secret to being rich and unemployed is crime. (TMD)
  • All material culture is an instantiation of ideas. But it’s easier to see ideas-in-things with a knowing, irony-laden look at the past. Putting babies on display in incubators, especially because they were ones unlikely to survive, now strikes us as abhorrent. We feel confident in seeing its errors and therefore reassured by our good judgment. It’s much harder to see what’s unfolding right in front of us. (Sara Hendren, Pattern Recognition)
  • Be it noted, please!, that NATO nations pledge to help defend countries attacked from outside NATO. It does not oblige anyone to help Donald Trump prosecute an offensive war against Iran.
  • No need to spend any money on a hot water heater, as hot water doesn’t need heating. Now, if we’re talking a water heater, different story (yes, I’m THAT GUY). (Social media poster, name withheld by me.)
  • A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward Murrow)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Tax Day

Last Branch Standing

When you go see an argument, you’ve been on the opposite side, you know that this court is an extremely well-prepared court, that the justices have read the briefs, that the justices know the case. And I think our conversation in conference reflects that. It’s substantive. It’s a conversation that only people who have really done the reading and done the thinking could have. And again, I think if you were a fly on the wall, you would be pretty proud of the institution.

Justice Elena Kagan (2019), via SCOTUSblog.

Yesterday was the release date of Sarah Isgur’s first book, Last Branch Standing.

Abandoning the modern altars

When Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston in 1989, damaging 80% of the city’s homes and businesses, local leaders discovered that there were not enough traditional artisans in the nation, let alone the state, to make necessary repairs to historic properties. Industrialization, combined with a cultural shift toward white-collar work, had almost entirely erased the craft of building. As a result, efforts to reconstruct the city were delayed. Desperate homeowners commissioned tradesmen from outside the United States or otherwise relied on contractors who used modern construction methods that undermined the historic integrity of the buildings.

Farahn Morgan, Inside Charleston’s craft renaissance, about Charleston’s American College of Building Arts, which grew out of this 1989 wake-up call.

I’m handy (or at least used to be) at fixing things, but not “artistic,” so I don’t know what a young me would have made of the ACBA, which seems to require artistry in many or most of the crafts it teaches. Old me can hardly get enough of it. Maybe we’re repenting after a long haul of worshipping at the altars of growth and efficiency.

It’s over

Damon Linker, “raised as a secular Jew deeply attached to the state of Israel,” thinks that the “days when a unification of American and Israeli interests was even partially convincing are over and done”:

On Twitter/X, I’ve taken to calling events over the past five weeks Israel’s fantasy war. What I mean is that Israel appears to have concluded that the best (or only) way for it to protect itself (“re-establish deterrence”) is to “settle all family business” in the manner of Michael Corleone knocking off the heads of the competing mafia crime families in a series of bloody assassinations, even if those actions kill a bunch of innocent bystanders as collateral damage. So they spent roughly two years flattening much of Gaza, killing untold tens of thousands of civilians in the process, with the goal of ending Hamas’ control of the territory. (Measured by that standard, the operation has been a failure, since a greatly weakened Hamas continues to govern those parts of the strip Israel does not directly occupy.) It pulled off an impressive operation in September 2024, simultaneously blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah across Lebanon. (Twelve people died and thousands were injured, but since then missiles have continued to bombard the north of Israel.) In the so-called 12-Day War between Israel and Iran last June, the U.S. contributed to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. (This was so unsuccessful, or insufficient, that the current, longer, and vastly more ruinous war apparently became necessary just eight months later. Or so the Netanyahu government insisted.)

This war—or this succession of wars—is a fantasy because it seeks to enact the longstanding dream of securing the conditions for Jewish safety and security through brute force and the infliction of suffering alone …

…

Israel today is a country lashing out in multiple directions in often murderous rage at its enemies.

That even includes the largely powerless Palestinians of the West Bank, who increasingly endure pogroms at the hands of settlers apparently intent on enacting a barbaric policy of slow-motion ethnic cleansing that will eventually make it possible to establish Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea. (Yes, that’s the slogan advocates for a Palestinian state recite when they want to express a desire to wipe Israel off the map. When Israeli settlers direct it at Palestinians, the intent is no less genocidal.)

I have no particular horse in this race — yet, but I’m not sure my “having an opinion” matters much — but when someone like Linker counsels “divorce,” it carries some weight as an sort of declaration against interest.

The true scholar

Greek and Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Abandoned (not banned) Books

Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic writes about Why We Abandon Books. It may be worth your while, but my abandonment tends these days to involve just one decision:

You are 77 years old, sir, with no guarantee of hitting even 78 let alone getting through hundreds of backlogged books. Forget sunk costs. Is this book really worth the X days it looks as if it will take, or should you cut your losses and move on?

  • I slogged through Middlemarch for 22 days because of the voice of the narrator (though I did like Dorothea and eventually decided that Will and Fred were okay; I never did figure out the Doctor).
  • I abandoned A Box of Matches, even though it was 2-3 days tops.
  • If I still have an unread David Bentley Hart, I’ll give it to the library “used” book sale without cracking it. Fool me once (The Beauty of the Infinite), shame on you. Fool me twice, nah.
  • I may get back to The Matter With Things, of which I’ve finished one major section, but I kinda feel like I’ve either gotten McGilchrist’s gist or else I need more time to digest what I’ve gotten.

Introducing the Gentlemanosphere

As noted, I’m a geezer, feeling the cold breath on my neck all too often. I tend to reject some new things, especially if they remind me somehow of fads in my lifetime, like, for a non-random instance, “servant leadership.”

And the Gentlemanosphere is new to me. And it did evoke a sigh of “oh, servant leadership again!” But I guess there probably is a need in every generation to counter idjits Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes with something more wholesome. So here’s a table and a link if you’re interested. I’m probably too old for this.

AspectManosphereGentlemanosphere
Core BeliefsMen should dominate socially and control women; traditional gender roles enforced strictly.Men should protect, provide, procreate with kindness and strength; masculinity is positive and diverse.
View on WomenWomen belong in traditional roles (e.g., kitchen); often hostile or dismissive toward women’s advancement.Women’s advancement and men’s well-being are mutually reinforcing; equality supported alongside healthy masculinity.
Ideological ToneOften aggressive, hostile, sometimes racist, antisemitic, and exclusionary.Empathetic, inclusive, encourages emotional expression and community building.
Political AlignmentFar-right, reactionary, anti-feminist.Centrist or mainstream; bipartisan engagement, policy-driven advocacy.
Prominent FiguresAndrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron GainesScott Galloway, Richard Reeves, David French, Arthur Brooks, Chris Williamson, Jocko Willink
Approach to MasculinityDefined by dominance signals: physical strength, control, aggression.Defined by responsibility, emotional openness, personal growth, and legacy-building.
Communication StyleProvocative, confrontational, uses social media to spread ideology rapidly.Thoughtful, gentle messaging; uses podcasts, books, mainstream media for nuanced discussion.
Target AudienceYoung men attracted to clear dominance narratives and rebellion against modern social norms.Boys and men seeking practical advice, emotional support, and sustainable self-improvement.
View on Male StrugglesOften blames external forces (feminism, society) but offers simplistic “take back control” solutions.Recognizes complex causes of male struggles; advocates for empathy, new solutions beyond blame or pathologizing masculinity.
Gender PoliticsZero-sum: men’s gain seen as women’s loss; often opposes feminist progress.Non-zero-sum: advancing men’s well-being promotes stronger families and societies benefiting all genders.
Cultural ImpactPolarizing; often results in backlash and social division.Gaining mainstream attention; influencing policymakers and public discourse constructively.
Criticism FacedAccused of promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, extremism.Criticized for being vague or “soft,” sometimes accused unfairly of aligning with far-right views.
Mental and Emotional HealthOften dismissive of emotional vulnerability; promotes toughness at all costs.Encourages emotional expression and seeking help; supports mental health awareness for men.
Economic and Social AdviceFocuses on reclaiming traditional male roles; sometimes promotes controversial or harmful behavior (e.g., pickup artistry).Emphasizes economic security, community building, responsible fatherhood, and healthy relationships.

Shorts

  • Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
  • [I]t’s just not true that destroying a lot of Iranian bridges and power plants would kill Iranian civilization. It would do enormous economic and physical damage, to be sure. But it takes a real estate guy to think a civilization is no more than a collection of bridges and buildings. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • “I don’t know about you,” he wrote earlier this week, “but I think that if one of our war aims is to literally erase a civilization from the face of planet Earth, it probably qualifies as a ‘war,’ and that Congress, which has already signaled its willingness to spend lots of money on this, should have the decency to call it such, and give that dignity to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The people dying in this are dying in a war.” (Michael Brendan Dougherty via Jonah Goldberg)
  • I don’t play with betting markets, but if I did, I’d bet a tidy sum that Trump (with the help of J.D. Vance’s negotiating acumen) will deliver us a souped-up version of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal by a different name. Sort of like how Trump basically kept NAFTA in his first term but gave it a new name, we might get the JCPOA but rebranded as the MIRGA (Make Iran Great Again) deal. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • Damn, it’s expensive to steal oil. (P.J. O’Rourke via Kevin D. Williamson

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

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

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Ides of March

Literacy versus Immersivity

The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics. But perhaps they do not consider themselves Protestant anymore. Perhaps the word is an anachronism; perhaps the word is a slur. Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity. It inhabited one specific form of literacy: in a world where people can no longer read—with attention and depth—you can only have post-Protestants. That there are Christianities focused again on a single form of literacy does not make them Protestant, if the single form is different. It does not make them Catholic either, of course—that is, it makes them bad Catholics.

Ross McCullough, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster.

Some explanation is in order. This quote is not — at least not directly — a diagnosis of our present situation, because the book is fiction, set in a dystopian future. (See the book notes at Bookshop.org for more detail.)

That said, the idea that “Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity” is striking (it was new to me at least) even if the “immersivity” referred to is beyond our current Virtual Reality headsets. It also meshes with Brad East’s provocative suggestion that Evangelicalism is not Protestant:

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

To my mind, what McCullough adds to East is the causality by which Protestantism disappeared: the neglect of reading and the valorization of spectacle and feeling — media literacy over print literacy.

Pernicious delusion

Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Paul Kingsnorth, In the Desert of the Heart.

Where are our spoils?

Speaking of the retreat of print literacy, above, I’m reading Mark A. Noll’s classic book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

I tried to read it a few years ago and quit about 20% into it because I felt like a voyeur, peeking in on a family’s internal quarrel (and maybe feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I did). I’ve come back to it now because my interest now is less salacious and more about how it came to pass that the dominant American Christian tradition of my adult lifetime has so little interest in cultivating excellence in scholarship, the sciences and other “mind” activities, even as it exults in big-name athletes, actors and musicians (exemplars of excellence in their fields) who profess evangelical Christian faith.

That “scandal” ramifies: there are no evangelical Nobel Laureates, no evangelical Supreme Court Justices, and, as Noll put it, “not a single evangelical periodical in the United States or Canada that exists for the purpose of seriously considering the worlds of nature, society, politics, or the arts in the way that the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the Washington Post’s National Weekly Edition do for the general public.”

Again, from Noll’s “indictment”:

What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.

Nevertheless, I have now seen a call for a kind of affirmative action in the worst sense:

Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.

Aaron M. Renn, Evangelical Christians help the Supreme Court and elite institutions.

If you don’t earn it, maybe you can just demand it, as in We’re big and we helped elect you: where are our spoils?

Affirmative action for Evangelicals! The horseshoe theory of politics lives!

(The Washington Post has several letters to the editor noting the irony as well.) This was not Aaron Renn’s finest hour.

Not unrelated to DEI for Evangelicals

The religious right of a previous era really was trying to bring biblically based convictions into the political realm, with the aim of moving the latter into greater conformity with the former. Today, by contrast, “biblically based convictions” have been replaced, among many voters who would normally be defined as members of the religious right, by blatantly partisan convictions that are given a theological gloss.

Damon Linker’s hypothesis about the religious right. Beware, especially, the latter kind of “biblically based convictions.”

Wary of Contentment

A friend of mine was ordained to the Diaconate in the Orthodox Church last Sunday. He’ll probably become a Priest in a few more years.

The burdens of the Priesthood are great, even apart from a shortage of Priests. The foremost burden is that Priests (and Bishops) must one day answer to God for their parishioners as well as for themselves.

[I]f we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit’s abiding power.

The late Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2007, via Fr. Stephen Freeman.

As the current national government explicitly exults in its lethality, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

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

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

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

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

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

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

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

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

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

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

Tu quoque

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

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

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

Infantile rebellion

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

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

Wordplay

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

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

…

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

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

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

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

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

…

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

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

Gracy Olmstead.

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

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

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

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

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

Re-orientation

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

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

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

This practice offers a threefold reorientation: 

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

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

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

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

…

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

David Brooks

History based on reality

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

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

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

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

Presumption of Regularity Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

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

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

…

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

…

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

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

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

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

The death of the magazine

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

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

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

Felicitous sentences

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

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

Thursday, 12/4/25

Luxury Beliefs

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

Yasha Mounk, Luxury Beliefs Are Real.

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

The Hive Mind

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental law

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

Andrew O’Donohue on “court-baiting.”

The Reality of Irreligious Violence

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

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld