Culture
Wry truism
Paul Krugman compared the welfare of Europeans with that of Americans: “It should count for something that there’s a growing gap between European and U.S. life expectancy, since the quality of life is generally higher if you aren’t dead.”
Über-speak
- One suspects, rather, that noisily associating with driverless cars helps to preserve Uber’s image as a “tech” company, rather than as an especially aggressive practitioner of labor and financial arbitrage. Beneath the cutting-edge hocus-pocus, Uber’s “driver-partners” appear to have entered a sharecropper economy from which it is difficult to exit.
- We should notice that while driverless cars hold real potential to ease congestion, and thereby contribute to the common good, there has been no talk of treating as a public utility the infrastructure that will make driverless cars possible, nor of making their programming available for inspection. What is being proposed, as near as one can make it out through the fog of promotional language, is an “urban operating system” of mobility that would be owned by a cartel of IT companies, participation in which would not be optional in any meaningful sense. … In the mentality of corporate libertarianism, there is no concept of legitimate public authority as that which secures the interests of citizens against the power of monopoly capital.
Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive
Transing the gay away
There’s a genre of aphorism in the form “If you don’t like X, just wait ’till you see Y.”
I’m not sure “transing the gay away” is any improvement over “praying the gay away,” but it’s what we’ve now got.
[T]he vast majority of children with gender dysphoria are gay or lesbian; and this is the target population for child sex changes. How can you tell which kids are going to end up as transgender and which will become gay or lesbian? The official answer is that it is clear in every single case. The actual answer is that we can’t know for sure. But if the policy is that any child who merely says they are the opposite sex cannot be questioned, and must be fast-tracked toward an irreversible sex change, we have a huge danger: that gay children will have their bodies wrecked, their fertility ended, and their sex lives stunted because we have erased the trans and gay distinction, and, in fact, merged the two.
Andrew Sullivan on The Meaningless Incoherence Of “LGBTQ+”.
Miscellancy from TGIF
- Tucker Carlson went to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. In his announcement prefacing the interview, he says that while many American journalists have interviewed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.” Well. I’m sure every major outlet has tried: Putin, who hates free speech and hates a free press, simply refuses … Putin is the reason we don’t hear from Putin. And there is a real American journalist in Russia right now: that’s Wall Street Journal reporter and current Russian prisoner Evan Gershkovich, who we see only when he’s marched into a plexiglass box for another hearing in his show trial. ….
- Nextdoor’s stock is collapsing, which personally makes me a little happy. You see, Nextdoor started as a useful neighborhood communication tool. The trouble is, neighbors like talking about things that the idealistic young workers of Nextdoor don’t approve of, namely crime. You guessed it. Yes, among each other, neighbors, at least in my area of Los Angeles, often talk about which house on the block was broken into and whether they were attacked or just robbed, things such as that. Bad talk, you baddie homeowners … Bad talk has been suppressed on Nextdoor, where you may discuss only things that twentysomething engineers (who live in guarded apartment towers with doormen) agree is healthy. Like juice cleanses. …
- Speaking of places I don’t need the government, this week Florida’s Ron DeSantis is supporting a state ban on lab-grown meat. “You need meat, OK? We’re gonna have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said. “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.” …
- Dartmouth is bringing back the SAT requirement for all applicants, a first for the Ivy League, which made the SAT and ACT optional in 2020. The argument was that all tests are racist, and what’s not racist are extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations. Yes, there is nothing more egalitarian than being the goalie on a travel hockey team, a $10,000 trip to Ecuador to volunteer, and a stunning letter of recommendation from a teacher who has eight kids in her class. Sure, all studies show that the SAT has a surprisingly egalitarian effect across race and class. But dropping the test was worth it for these schools. Why? Because knowing SAT scores makes it much harder for Harvard and Yale to legally discriminate against Asians. Anyway, Dartmouth really does want to know who’s actually smart, so they’re bringing it back. What else is happening in education?
The late, great David Graeber
There seems a broad consensus not so much even that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
Recommendations
- There is a young, Christian writer named Bethel McGrew who is now on my radar and probably should be on yours. Taste her Substack.
- Poems Ancient and Modern is a publication about poetry. Joseph Bottum, a writer in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina, choose and comment on poems, old and new, ancient and modern. Drawn from the deep traditions of English verse — the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive — the poetry, with its accompanying commentary, demonstrates that poetry still enthralls the ear, instructs the mind, and aids the soul.
- Rebecca Solnit, How to Comment on Social Media.
Sporty
The story that’s almost as big as the game
I had some reasonably good quotes here from David French on the supposed political conspiracy behind — oh, I dunno — Taylor Swift becoming popular and getting a hunky NFL boyfriend, all the better to re-elect Joe Biden.
I’m not going to blog them because I think this “story” is nut-picking that turned into a journalistic murmuration.
In other words, I know I’m out of touch with MAGA-America, but it appears to me that the people obsessing about this “story” are opportunistic journalists and pundits (sorry David), not Trumpists.
I wrote every word of the preceding three paragraphs before Freddie deBoer came along and did an even better job of debunking this stuff: Perhaps Taylor Swift Isn’t the Defining Political Issue of Our Times. (Trigger warning: the full article contains Marxism.):
[I]t turns out that when you spend your time making fun of the stupid nonsense conservatives are spending their time freaking out about, you are also spending your precious time on earth on stupid nonsense … There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes.
After reading Freddie, I didn’t have the stomach to read an Atlantic story on the cosmic significance of Joni Mitchell at the 2024 Grammy Awards.
Wherein I comment on a sportsball
I generally am not a big fan of sportsball of any kind, but I’ve become more of a fan of Premier League soccer (the stamina of those guys is a marvel) and I’m an intense (if fair-weather) fan of Purdue Men’s basketball.
After #2 Purdue’s road win over #6 Wisconsin, sportswriters are saying things like “Purdue basketball shows it is elite, even when not its best” (Sam King) and the equivalent, elaborated nicely by Greg Doyel.
I’ve got to disagree. The team play on the road against Wisconsin is Purdue at its best. Its best is not Edey scoring 30 points, or Loyer raining down 3-pointers. Not when an opponent defends Edey and gives few open looks on 3s like Wisconsin did.
Lance Jones 20, Braden Smith 19, Zach Edey 18. That inversion is Purdue at its best, and it’s why they’ve got an unusually good shot at the NCAA Tournament.
Just sayin’.
Trump-adjacent
ICYMI
February 8, 2024 was a very, very, very good day for a certain Donald J. Trump.
- All who listened to SCOTUS are confident he’s headed back to the ballot in Colorado.
- The Special Counsel report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents was devastating to Team Biden.
(H/T Advisory Opinions podcast for that insight.)
I’d sooner drink muddy water than say “congratulations;” I’m just laying out the facts.
The limits of democracy
Trump Doesn’t Threaten Democracy—He Embodies It – WSJ
I know there’s a meta-argument that Trump “threatens democracy.” But the more obvious argument is that he embodies it, and it’s making a lot of people understandably sick with anxiety.
My point is that “democracy” is not worthy of our worship and never was.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
That, gentle reader, is our problem.
What can a traditional Republican do?
The moment Trump launched his insurgent campaign in June 2015, the old [Republican] order began to crumble. Now the rabble was calling the shots—and it had found its tribune.
This displaced a lot of intellectuals who had gotten used to the old way of doing business. They now had three options: They could find another line of work and thereby disappear into the American woodwork; they could become Never Trump dissenters, which either meant keeping the old fusionist-conservative remnant alive for some hoped-for fantasy future (The Dispatch) or becoming post-Republican centrist Democrats (The Bulwark); or they could try and adapt to the new Trumpian order of things on the right.
The staff of First Things, long after I’d departed, took the third path, as did many others at both old and new magazines, think tanks, and digital media outlets. Some of the work these people did and continue to do is worthwhile in trying to put policy meat on the bare bones of right-wing populism/nationalism.
Damon Linker, The Right’s New Abnormal Normal.
Linker is not wrong about First Things, to which I’ve subscribed since its sane beginnings. As a charter subscriber to The Dispatch, I guess I’m now basically a fusionist-conservative, waiting for “some hoped-for fantasy future.” I know that I frequently think “if that’s what ‘conservatism’ is today, then I’m not conservative,” but I’m as yet unconvinced that the present populist moment is what conservatism is.
“Trump? we already did that one.”
It is well to remember that pundits fail:
The Constitution says that if Trump is impeached and then convicted, he can be banned from running for president again. Trump run again? Democrats should only be so lucky. The media culture does not allow second chances, whatever the Constitution may say. “Trump? we already did that one.” He’s over. He lost the election by 10 million votes. Is there anyone who has become more sympathetic to Trump since Election Day?
Michael Kinsley: Against Impeachment
Peggy Noonan schools the press
How should the press cover a presumable Trump-Biden presidential rematch? More pointedly, how should it cover Donald Trump?
The history that precedes that question is well known. In 2015-16 the media, having discovered that Mr. Trump was a walking talking ratings bump and being honestly fascinated by his rise, turned the airwaves over to him knowing he couldn’t win. He won. In a great cringe of remorse and ideological horror, many did penance by joining the “resistance.” The result: Mr. Trump wasn’t stopped—he got a whole new fundraising stream out of “fake news”—but journalism’s reputation was drastically harmed.
Peggy Noonan, who goes on to share detailed ideas on how the press needs to rehabilitate that damaged reputation.
Election 2024
We’re now looking at an election pitting the 14th Amendment against the 25th.
I don’t know what it will take for some folks to acknowledge that our American Experiment can fail.
As already noted,
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
If it seems like a nonsequitur to blame two notoriously unsuitable major-party candidates on immorality and apostasy, you’ve got a distorted idea of how judgment works: sometimes, it’s just a matter of God stepping back and saying “Okay, have it your way.”
So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.