Category: Journalism

Monday 5/22/23

Open Culture Wars

Our Culture War is a Cold War

True revolutionaries do not need to borrow authority from institutions, because they have the power to take what they want from their unconsenting enemy. The woke Left, whether we want to admit it or not, and whether it is itself conscious of it or not, has no such power. It has only consenting victims.

…

People on the New Right will probably object, claiming that they’re unwilling to listen to and aren’t convinced by the woke Left but are coerced into acquiescing in its beliefs and required conduct thanks to its institutional power—that they are the victims of a form of violence. But the nature of the new Left’s power is not Schmittian. Instead, its power comes from its capacity to influence the state through … “institutional capture” [a/k/a] “cultural hegemony.”

…

The irritating proximity of different ways of life, which is inevitable in complex modern societies, would not lead their proponents to such extreme expressions of disdain and mutual hatred if those proponents were made to bear the consequences of their discourse. Without such a prospect, each side can all too safely afford to see the other as an absolute enemy and claim to heroically stand for its cause. In the spirit of Schmitt, no situation is as little political as ours.

…

The woke Left and the New Right are manifestations of a deeper crisis. Both of them find their origin in the neutral state’s aims to liberate people from the responsibility to determine and to pursue a common good, and therefore focus on the administration of things. The state remains neutral out of fear that our disagreements about the common good might lead us to become enemies. But polarization shows clearly enough that peace reduced to mere coexistence, and the virtues attached to it (tolerance and moderation), fall short of what makes human beings want to form a united people, and ready to cultivate the virtues necessary to achieve such a goal.

Freedom, understood as individual autonomy, can never be the sole or even the main question to which a political regime provides the collective answer: How to live together and still be free?

…

Our problem is not that Left and Right are bringing us to the verge of civil war, but that their political demands have become completely detached from the reality of the human relations that make the satisfaction of such demands possible and just.

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

That essay was a real mind-bender for someone like me who has bought the narrative that we are dangerously polarized, almost on the brink of a hot civil war. It’s one of the rare pieces I’m flagging (Obsidian bookmark) to re-read after a while.

The other essays in the series are linked at the top of Carré’s essay.

Our ideologically incoherent tribes

Today, the Lewises argue, “Left” and “Right” are competing bundles of unconnected and sometimes incompatible issue commitments held together by tribalism. The authors bring to bear a wealth of social science research that shows that people’s issue commitments are more heavily influenced by group loyalties than by philosophical consistency. They also catalogue a history of various political stances that, for example, began as Right, then were considered Left, and sometimes back again, depending on the coalitions’ needs. Trade protectionism, for example, was “Right;” then “Left;” now “Right” again (or maybe “Right” and “Left”). Foreign interventionism took the reverse course. Today what counts as “Right” and “Left” has become conflated with party, and party with the views of individual leaders. All of this, the Lewises contend, cuts strongly against the “essentialist” concept of ideology and in favor of their “social theory.”

Andrew Busch, reviewing The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis.

Considering what became of the GOP in 2015-16, this “social theory of ideology” has some obvious appeal, as the GOP now holds policies opposite those held ten years ago, and the change was not gradual and evolutionary.

Covert Culture Wars

No Place of One’s Own

To make every place available to all is not to erase privilege, if by that term we mean something illegitimate. Rather it is to erase an earned ability to know and to use diverse and localized pockets of the world according to different levels of personal investment and responsibility. Another way to name this would be the end of ownership, conceived not simply as private property, but as title to inhabit some place on the earth as one’s own.

Matthew Crawford, Seeing Like Google

Google Street View undermines our ability to inhabit a place on earth as our own, and Google has ambitions toward something even more deracinating (I suspect it involved the map of your home created by your Roomba and uploaded to our overlords.)

It is good periodically to be reminded, first, how evil Google is and, second, to trace the implications of its hubris (and its market-tested insouciant responses to objectors).

Participatory disinformation

Disinformation and conspiracism spread in advanced, individualistic democracies like the United States not because their targets are sheeplike but because, to the contrary, so many people are active collaborators in their own deception. … “It’s a fight between good and evil,” one woman told the Associated Press in 2021, explaining why she spent hours every day scouring the internet for proof that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. “She saw systems fail those most vulnerable,” reported the A.P., “and her faith in the standard truth-bearers of American democracy—courts, Congress, the media—eroded. She felt she could trust nothing but believe anything.… … Conspiracy theories like the ones about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic “are profoundly participatory disinformation campaigns,”

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Return from captivity

Playing in her first real WNBA game in 579 days, Brittney Griner did something Friday night in Los Angeles that national television audiences hadn’t seen her do in a long time: The Phoenix Mercury center stood for the national anthem.

She stopped doing so in 2020 but has resumed the practice after returning from 10 months of imprisonment in Russia. “One thing that’s good about this country is our right to protest,” Griner said after the game when I asked her about the issue. “You have a right to be able to speak out, question, to challenge, and do all these things. [After] what I went through, it just means a little bit more to me now. I was literally in a cage and could not stand the way I wanted to … and a lot of other situations. Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely wanted to stand.”

Jemele Hill

Trans matters

Telling statistics from Tavistock

The Tavistock Centre, the sole facility in the NHS dedicated to [gender reassignment], kept statistics on the children who came to their doors. Among those referred in 2012, ninety percent of natal girls and 80 percent of natal boys reported being same-sex attracted or bisexual. There is no inherent relationship between trans and gay and bi people. So why this staggering overlap? No answer. If a Christianist hospital was busy changing the sexes of overwhelmingly gay kids, so that they became straight, what do you think the gay rights establishment would say? But when a queer facility does exactly that, all the worriers are bigots.

… From the Times of London:

So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left.” “It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” he told The Times. “Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.”

Another female clinician said: “We heard a lot of homophobia which we felt nobody was challenging. A lot of the girls would come in and say, ‘I’m not a lesbian. I fell in love with my best girl friend but then I went online and realised I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy. Phew.”

You might imagine that, given this record, the queers would go out of their way to reassure us, to show how tight the safeguarding is, how they screen thoroughly to ensure that gay kids are not swept up in this. But they regard the very question of whether gay kids are at risk as out of bounds.

Andrew Sullivan, Notes on a Medical Scandal. I don’t recall Sullivan ever before penning such a crie de couer, but I’m glad he did. You should read the whole thing if you can, bearing in mind that “queer” isn’t used as an insult but as the self-chosen adjective of the activists he’s opposing.

I had not known the “staggering” extent of the overlap between homosexual attractions and subsequent trans identification, but had been aware that most adolescents who presented with gender dysphoria would, if denied medical transition, eventually settle into conventional gay or lesbian identities. That probably is why the trans ideologues are ruling the very question of whether gay kids are at risk out of bounds, transphobic and evil.

I should also mention (confess?) that I have previously overlooked (not just underestimated the “stick” of anti-gay bullying, underestimated the role of qualms about homosexual attraction, and overestimated the “carrot” of social valorization as motives for kids to declare themselves trans.

Inconvenient parallel

California banned conversion therapy for minors in 2012. That law later withstood two legal challenges. I wonder if the precedents in those cases will affect legal challenges to the Texas and Florida bills [banning gender transitioning procedures for minors] as judges weigh whether legislators overreached in denying treatments many trans kids want.

Conor Friedersdorf

The Culture without the War

CNN trembling at the prospect of Trump 2024

[I]f you remember CNN’s ratings during the Trump presidency, then you know that quivering you see among the talking heads now might not be rage so much as thrill. More like the quivering you hear about in romance novels. There’s an unholy but unstoppable union, a love hidden but never extinguished kind of shake—yes yes yes!—it’s the story of Donald J. Trump and cable news.

Nellie Bowles

The Ancients: What Makes the Best Regime?

The ancient philosophers’ primary question was what makes the best regime. Democracy certainly did not qualify. Why not? The answer was simple. They thought democracy was a messy system, systematically undermining the rule of law, profoundly partisan, often hostile to the most prominent leaders and citizens. The famous defense of democratic Athens delivered by Pericles in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is in fact more a defense of Athens and Athenian imperialism than of the democratic political model. When Plato and Aristotle wrote their scathing remarks about the Athenian system, they thought it was already in decline and Athens might soon become a victim of the crisis from which it would not be able to recover. And this is exactly what happened.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Guilt by Association

There seems to be some titilating about famous men who knew Jeffrey Epstein, the latest being Noam Chomsky.

For the record, I think human beings — even Jeffrey Epstein — are more complicated than that. If every man who knew Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator, then I should give up on Christianity and become a frank Manichean.

Miscellany

  • A student told me there were no objective moral truths.  I mentioned a precept of the Decalogue, and asked “What about that?”  He replied, “That’s not morality, that’s justice.”  But if we take justice in the classical sense – giving to each what is due to him – almost all morality is about justice.  To my wife, I owe fidelity; to my parents, honor; to the child whom I sire, an intact family in which to enjoy the care of me and his mother.
  • A warning to intellectuals such as myself. Supposing the existence of square circles, you can do a lot of things: You can make syllogisms about them, you can develop theories about them, you can even prove theorems about them. But that doesn’t mean that they exist.
  • As a Christian, I believe in the Messiah.  That doesn’t mean I have to like political messianism, which we find both on the right and on the left.  The difference is that left-wing political messianism is usually utopian, trusting the hero to take us to a political promised land — but right-wing political messianism is usually reactive, trusting the hero to save us from the crazies who believe in utopia.  The advantage here lies with the left, because unfortunately, most people are more impressed by lunatic visionaries than by persons with no vision at all.

J Budziszewski

The Burden

I realized
at dusk
under the flight path
of the rooks
that this weight on me
was perhaps not words
or my need to belong
but was the weight
of knowing too much
seeing too much
taking on too much
staring too long into the abyss
taking it all so personally.

(Paul Kingsnorth, versified by me because I felt that it “scanned” as poetry)

Rank Politics

DeSantis head-scratcher

Some of what Ron DeSantis is doing seems sensible, some dubious, some flat-out weird. What in heaven’s name is the purpose of the “2-minute opening remarks” in the fifth item on this list?

Reparations

A group of prominent Democrats are calling for $14 trillion to be paid as reparations to the descendants of slaves. The bill was introduced by Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who said: “The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.” I’m on board with reparations. At least, I think it’d be better to do a big reparations shebang—cut checks and call it a day—than the strange sort of slow-drip reparations plans we see in liberal institutions. Like, yes, $14 trillion is a lot of money. But if the alternative is Robin DiAngelo trainings till the end of time and making the MCAT illegal and allowing people to self-ID as doctors because that’s more equitable, then $14 trillion is a bargain. 

But here’s why reparations … will never happen: simply cutting checks to the descendants of slaves means shuttering all the thousands of racial justice nonprofits that serve as an employment program for America’s white grad students ….

Nellie Bowles

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

R.R. Reno

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.

Experience versus parsing

Culture

AI: Biological minds experience; Synthesis engines parse.

I was not losing any sleep over Artificial General Intelligence, which is good since “Artificial General Intelligence” is (I very recently learned) an hyperbole, inflating what ChatGPT and its ilk really are.

Baldur Bjarnason’s Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley didn’t entirely reassure me that the synthetic text-parser we’ve been having fun with for a few months don’t present some real problems, but the problems are orders of magnitude less, and almost certainly qualitatively different from, the breathless speculations that keep turning up.

But Bjarnason’s article was so laugh-inducing and persuasive debunking that I could easily over-quote. I’ll narrow my focus to the passages I think likeliest to break the spell of any reader(s) who are overestimating AI today’s sophisticated stabs at the Turing Test:

The idea that there is intelligence somehow inherent in writing is an illusion. The intelligence is all yours, all the time: thoughts you make yourself in order to make sense of another person’s words.

…

Because text and language are the primary ways we experience other people’s reasoning, it’ll be next to impossible to dislodge the notion that these are genuine intelligences. No amount of examples, scientific research, or analysis will convince those who want to maintain a pseudo-religious belief in alien peer intelligences. After all, if you want to believe in aliens, an artificial one made out of supercomputers and wishful thinking feels much more plausible than little grey men from outer space. But that’s what it is: a belief in aliens.**

It doesn’t help that so many working in AI seem to want this to be true. They seem to be true believers who are convinced that the spark of Artificial General Intelligence has been struck.

They are inspired by the science fictional notion that if you make something complex enough, it will spontaneously become intelligent.

…

General reasoning seems to be an inherent, not emergent, property of pretty much any biological lifeform with a notable nervous system.

Baldur Bjarnason, Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley.

Note that this is not actually human exceptionalism (not that I’d oppose that), but biological exceptionalism, commenting favorably on the actual intelligence of, say, bumble bees, with fewer than half a billion brain cells, in contrast to what machines do.

GenZ vices

People who grow up in this culture of distrust are bound to adopt self-protective codes of behavior. I’ve been teaching college students on and off for 25 years. Over the last few years, students have become much less willing to argue with one another in class. They don’t want to be viciously judged. It’s not even that they are consciously afraid of being canceled. It’s simply that the norm of non-argumentativeness in public has settled over many (but not all) parts of campus culture.

David Brooks, What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young

History rhymes

Stephen Spender was a friend and contemporary of W. H. Auden’s, but he had nowhere near Auden’s surfeit of talent. Like Auden, he grew up in the 1930s, spent time in Berlin, saw some of what was coming, and wrote about it. His journals have interesting things in them, not least an insight he made in September 1939. “All the nice people I knew in Germany,” he says, “were either tired or weak.” Why was that the case? he asks his journal again two days later. He concludes that Yeats was right when he wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Douglas Murray.

Note the implication: there are people with the time to peruse the journals of second-rate poets.

Coronation

A salutary lesson from the coronation

The most mysterious and sacred centre of Charles’ coronation is the Anointing. In this ceremony, which dates back to the Old Testament, Charles will remove his robes of state. Dressed in a simple white shirt, he will be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with oil of chrism, made on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and blessed in a special ceremony by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The millions watching the Coronation won’t see any of this. Our screens will see only the anointing screen: an elaborate tapestry embroidered by the Royal School of Needlework, depicting every nation in the Commonwealth as leaves on a tree. Behind this, the Archbishop will pour the oil into an ornate silver-gilt spoon, the only surviving relic of the pre-Civil War coronation regalia, and anoint Charles on the hands, chest and head: a moment traditionally seen as between the sovereign and God, and thus closed to public view.

And in screening this moment from the view of public and cameras alike, Charles makes ceremonial acknowledgement of a truth with both personal and political significance, and profound countercultural power: that some things are not, and never will be, open to all.

Mary Harrington.

That truth is one of the reasons to oppose porn (for all the good opposition will do): it opens to all things that should be kept private.

A more dubious item

Before Charles III and Queen Consort Camilla made the trek from Buckingham Palace in the gilded Diamond Jubilee State Coach to Westminster—the nation’s coronation church since 1066—protests in and around Trafalgar Square were already taking place.

Police arrested Graham Smith, leader of the anti-monarchist group ‘Republic’, along with 52 others, invoking the fact that “their duty to prevent disruption outweighed the right to protest.”

Tristan Vanheuckelom.

We would readily recognize in, say, Red China or Russia, the suppression of dissent to created a comparably tidy spectacle. So are Red China and Russia not as bad as we’re taught, or is Britain worse?

Politics

When all you have is a hammer …

I have my own tribal biases, although lately not the ones I had for most of my life. I used to presume that the leftist take on any given subject wasn’t just wrong but informed by malice, however concealed. In the Trump era, my presumption has shifted: If the populist right is animated over some controversy, chances are the other side of the issue is the morally correct one.

…

[A] core conviction of Trumpism is the belief that every problem can be made less troublesome by the application of more violence. Illegal immigrants flooding the border? Shoot them in the legs. Fentanyl epidemic in the heartland? Bomb the cartels. BLM protests spiraling into riots? Invoke the Insurrection Act. D.A. breathing down your neck? Threaten “death and destruction” if you’re charged. Demonstrators disrupting your rallies? Offer to pay the legal fees of anyone who assaults them. Risk of a floor fight at your party’s political convention? Warn of riots if it happens. Lost a presidential election? Instigate a mob to overturn it by force.

Alarmed by an unstable homeless person on the subway? Choke him until he stops moving.

When all you have is an authoritarian hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Nick Cattagio, The Death of Jordan Neely.

Part of me — a very large part — regrets that Donald Trump not only hasn’t disappeared, but bodes to be elected in 2024, as America like a dog returns to its 2016 vomit. That’s why I continue to pass along observant stuff like the preceding.

Proud Boys eat Humble Pie

A federal jury on Thursday convicted five leaders of the Proud Boys militia—Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola—on multiple felony charges related to their activities on January 6, 2021. Four of the leaders—all except Pezzola—were found guilty of a seditious conspiracy to interfere with the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, and the five were also convicted on charges of obstructing an official proceeding, conspiring to prevent members of Congress and federal law enforcement officers from discharging their duties, civil disorder, and destruction of government property. Prosecutors are likely to seek lengthy sentences for all five.

The Morning Dispatch, 5/5/23.

The Department of Justice apparently decided to prosecute everyone who entered the Capital in the January 6 insurrection. Consequently, a fairly close acquaintance of mine (who strolled in looking like a sightseer, not an insurrectionist, in the photos in his indictment) has been convicted on fairly minor charges.

So it warms my heart to see that the real insurrectionists are getting convicted of some much more serious charges.

A bellwether?

The North Carolina Senate voted 29-20 on Thursday, entirely along party lines, to advance legislation prohibiting most abortions after 12 weeks of gestation, with exceptions for rape and incest (up to 20 weeks of gestation), “life-limiting anomalies,” (up to 24 weeks), and life of the mother (no limit). The bill also appropriates money for child and foster care programs, contraception, and paid parental leave for teachers and government employees. North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has said he will veto the measure, but Republicans—who have supermajorities in both chambers after a state representative recently changed parties—believe they have the votes to override him.

The Morning Dispatch, 5/5/23.

Before Roe v. Wade was overturned by Dobbs, I thought that the politics of abortion, back in the states, would eventually play out with abortion laws roughly like this: bans after the first trimester with exceptions.

It’s interesting that a very red legislature may have needed to add such exceptions in order to override a blue Governor’s veto. Were I still a Republican, I would very much enjoy holding up Roy Cooper’s veto threat as proof that Democrats are the real abortion absolutists (though I’d have the extremely restrictive laws of some solid-red states to explain away).

Nellie’s nuggets

I thought banning gas stoves was a conspiracy theory? Now, hold on. I was told just in January of this year that the gas stove ban was a fake right-wing culture war thing. 

NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon” 

Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”

Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”

MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”

AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”

The Washington Post: “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”

Which is why it’s so weird because just this week, New York state lawmakers banned gas stoves from all new construction. So it definitely does seem like Dems are coming for gas stoves, in that they just banned them in one of America’s most populous states. 

There’s usually a slightly longer lag between when the mainstream press tells us something is a crazy lie and when the press says okay, fine, it’s not a lie, it’s actually true, and also it’s a good thing—so this is surprising. I’ll be over here huffing carbon oxides and vapors.

Bud Light mess continues: Anheuser-Busch is offering their distributors free Bud Light to help them out as sales of the very bad beer continue to fall. This is the ongoing backlash for the company making a special beer can with transwoman influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s face on it. But if they want to repair relations, they should try giving out a better beer. If someone gave me boxes of free Bud Light, I would report it as a hate crime.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF: Writers of the World, Unite!.

In that first item, on gas stoves, Nellie’s conclusion echoes Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility.

The secret desire of the mainstream press

I … feel a certain vibe, in the eager coverage of DeSantis’s sag, suggesting that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders.

Ross Douthat, Are Anti-Trump Republicans Doomed to Repeat 2016?

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Thursday April 13, 2023

Cultural

A key moment creating modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Lotteries in perspective

Relatively unlikely

The Lottery: The Poor are Playing, and the Wealthy are Winning – Focus for Health

Progress?

[W]e tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”

Peter Thiel

Another Percy thought-experiment?

A letter to Dear Abby: I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Remember (or know, if you can’t remember) that Lost in the Cosmos is a very strange book. I don’t know whether this was a real “Dear Abby” letter.

But it should be.

Sex

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

…

For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Colin Wright, A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary

When individualisms clash, who wins?

This short paragraph is dense, but rewarding:

The legislation also demonstrates one of the oddest results of the modern emphasis on the radical freedom of the individual. In such a world, all must theoretically be allowed to have their own narratives of identity. But because some narratives of identity inevitably stand in opposition to others, some identities must therefore be privileged with legitimate status and others treated as cultural cancers. And that means that, in an ironic twist, the individual ceases to be sovereign and the government has to step in as enforcer. The lobby group of the day then decides who is in and who is out, with the result that, in this instance, the gay or trans person who wants to become straight or “cis” (to use the pretentious jargon), cannot be tolerated. His narrative calls into question that of others. We might say that his very existence is a threat. To grant any degree of legitimacy to his desire is to challenge the normative status of the desires of others.

Carl Trueman, Prohibiting Prayer in Australia

Political

Election 2024 Aftermath

[W]e’d be foolish not to see the risk of civil disorder and legal shenanigans as high no matter who loses in 2024. Downtowns were boarded up on the eve of the 2020 race not against angry and aggrieved Trump voters. Rural riots are hardly a thing. It was in deeply blue areas that local officials feared mass violence if the election didn’t turn out the way Democrats wanted.

…

You can’t analyze realities you refuse to see. Take a recent podcast with the Democratic campaign guru Joe Trippi that borders on the neurotic. He’s alarmed not because 75% of voters say they fear for the future of democracy, but because Republicans are saying this, since in his mind only Democrats are allowed to feel democracy is under threat (from Republicans, of course).

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., If Trump Wins in 2024, Then Who Threatens Democracy?

A new avatar for populism?

If you are someone who wish Trump would go away, Frank Luntz has some excellent, well-researched advice on what it will take (and thus implies what kind of candidates you should support).

Spoiler alert: populism isn’t going away any time soon, but Trump needn’t be its avatar.

Ennui

A Jules Feiffer cartoon in the Village Voice once depicted a man suffering from liberal ennui. The man shifted uncomfortably in his chair and explained how he was bored all the time, had no appetite, no interest in life, no sense of humor, no capacity even for outrage.

The punch line? “I need Nixon.”

William McGurn, Donald Trump’s Enemies Need Him, of a September 1974 cartoon.

As a grown-up, I’m sure you can imagine the current-world analogy.

Greg Abbott goes beyond jackassery

The law-and-order party has a law-and-order problem.

I’m not talking about the Republican Party’s tolerance for, and even unconditional defense of, Donald Trump’s many legally dubious acts—though that is certainly bad.

I’m talking, instead, about something far broader in the party and the culture from which it derives its political energy. We saw it in the way conservative media outlets and personalities back in 2020 treated 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of folk hero for shooting three men, killing two, during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after he made a point of driving, heavily armed, to the site of the protests from his home in neighboring Illinois.

We see it in strong support among Republicans, not only for permissive gun regulations, but also for laws allowing private citizens to carry military-grade firearms in public places, whether concealed or not.

And we see it in its most alarming form yet in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s promise to pardon Army sergeant Daniel Perry, who was convicted of murder last week for killing 28-year-old Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Austin in 2020.

Together these trends—but especially Abbott’s stance on Perry’s murder conviction—show us a party staking out a position incompatible with life under the rule of law and within a civil society. In its place, the GOP appears to favor a return to the unlawful disorder of the wild west, where vigilante violence and factional allegiances took the place of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, and promoting the general welfare.

Damon Linker

The jury’s conviction of Daniel Perry was amply supported by the evidence. No stand your ground law should cover a hot-head going and looking for trouble, then shooting someone dead before it even arrives.

The serial jackassery of Gov. Abbott is one reason why, netting the negatives out from the positives, living in Texas doesn’t appeal to me.

A successful third party

[I]t is worth remembering that there already has been a very successful third party: the Republican Party, which skyrocketed to power very shortly after its founding in 1854, with the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, winning the White House in 1860. By contrast, the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, has topped out at 3.3 percent in presidential elections—and that was in 2016, when the party’s ticket comprised two moderate Republican former governors (Gary Johnson and William Weld) running against two corrupt and contemptible New York Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Kevin D. Williamson, Meet the Whigs

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

April Fools Day

AI

I finally dipped my toe into ChatGPT, having been inspired by a story of a mom who used it to plan her child’s birthday party.

I had it draft a policy on delinquent tuition payment for a private school. High marks. Over the coming days, I’ll see what other logjams it can break on my project list.

I asked it “What are some real-world applications of the quadratic equation?” It gave a plausible answer, which I cannot evaluate since I haven’t used the equation since high school and cannot remember it. (If any kids are reading this, that’s probably because I became a lawyer, not an engineer.)

Since I get too easily enamored of technology, it behooves me to read smart critiques and concerns as they come along, if only to guide my personal conduct toward AI.

Nashville shooting

Journalistic lacunae

Why not explore [journalistically] how the attack on children and teachers in a Christian school affects Christians. This massacre may have been what some call a “hate-crime” against a religious group. And it’s odd that the community whose actual children were murdered seems less deserving of coverage than the community wrongly associated with a child-killer. It would be the equivalent of asking the Muslim community how they felt about a mass shooting in a synagogue, but never asking Jews.

It also seems legit to me to cover how violent memes and slogans and rhetoric can prime already-unstable people to commit violence. If it’s fair to call out the NRA’s materials after a mass killing (and I think it is), it’s also fair to note how common violent imagery and rhetoric has become in the TQIA+ world.

“Kill Terfs” is not a fringe slogan; it’s everywhere. A leader of the TQIA+ movement, Chase Strangio, has written that laws restricting child sex-changes are, in fact, laws to “criminalize known survival care for trans youth … That goal is akin to a goal of killing us.“ He has also claimed that his opponents “want to control and eradicate” trans people. Last weekend, a trans activist assaulted a gender-critical speaker with tomato juice in New Zealand, telling a crowd that “I want her to be full of blood, because that’s what she’s advocating for. She’s advocating for our genocide … our extermination.” The mob violently shut the event down. Then there are the many

grimacing skulls that promise “DEATH BEFORE DETRANSITION”, knives, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, assault rifles painted in the pastel tones of the trans flag, torrents of rape and death threats, the grim vow that “EVERY DAY IS TRANS DAY OF VENGEANCE.

And it would also be great if the press could fact-check not just the falsehood that trans people are more likely to murder, but also the idea, constantly reiterated by TQIA+ groups, of an “epidemic” of anti-trans, hate-motivated murders. That notion has been repeatedly debunked ….

Andrew Sullivan

Why don’t the police release the "manifesto"?

I was just about ready to join the demand for release of the Nashville Christian School shooter’s reported “manifesto” when this brought me up short:

consider this other possibility: Might the shooter’s manifesto contain accusations of some kind against family, school, church or others? If that’s the case, police and legal officials may be investigating these claims before airing them to the public.

That’s not an entirely idle speculation, as you’ll see if you follow the hyperlink, nor is it implausible: an extremely conservative Presbyterian church in my hometown badly mishandled sexual abuse in the congregation.

So, yes, sooner or later we need to see the “manifesto.” If they’re investigating claims of the manifesto, it would be nice to know.

The Trump Indictment

Selected quotes

I’ve written a bit about the New York case against Trump, now gone to indictment. None of it was particularly original, and neither is this, but then I’m pretty selective about what sources I’ll spend time reading.

That said, some notable commentary by others:

  • David Frum notes that the charges might not even be about Stormy Daniels. (Deciding what a grand jury’s up to is a bit like reading chicken entrails.)
  • In his statement responding to the indictment, the former president said, “Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done.” But never before in our nation’s history have we had a president as dishonorable, as unethical, and as malicious as Donald Trump. (Peter Wehner)
  • There’s something very, well, Trumpy about this: He has a way of making everything sordid. Instead of a dramatic discussion about the meaning of accountability for a president who sought to overthrow the will of the voters to stay in power, we’re arguing about the dirty mechanics of hush-money payments to an adult-film star. (Quinta Jurecic)
  • I worry that a failed prosecution might strengthen Trump. Yet I’d also worry — even more — about the message of impunity that would be sent if prosecutors averted their eyes because the suspect was a former president. [Paragraph break omitted] The former president’s fixer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for doing Trump’s bidding, and a fundamental principle of justice is that if an agent is punished, then the principal should be as well. That is not always feasible, and it may be difficult to replicate what a federal prosecution achieved in Cohen’s case. But the aim should be justice, and this indictment honors that aim. (Nicholas Kristoff, I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution)
  • There is a counterargument that this is America’s moment for prosecutorial discretion to allow the country to recover and move on. As a teenager, I was outraged when President Gerald Ford pre-emptively pardoned former President Richard Nixon, yet over time I came to think that it was the right call and allowed the country to heal. Yet one difference is obvious: Nixon in 1974 was already completely discredited, ostracized and broken, while Trump denies any wrongdoing and is running again for the White House. (Nicholas Kristoff, I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution)

Extradition

When someone on the Right accuses a progressive of being funded by George Soros, it damages my regard for the accuser more than for the accused. It’s a mark either of stupidity by the accuser or of his contempt for those listening. (The same goes for Lefties’ obsessions with the Koch brothers or Peter Thiel.)

Ron DeSantis is not stupid. You draw the necessary inference.

By the way, as Radley Balko points out, DeSantis famously removed a local prosecutor from office last year for declaring that he wouldn’t enforce the law as written for political reasons. That’s no different from what DeSantis himself is guilty of here [in claiming that “Florida will not assist in an extradition request”].

Nick Cattogio

Politics

Benchmarks

I want to leave a note here, because I expect to have many occasions to link back to it in the next several months.

Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.

I will be reminding you all of that, from time to time.

Kevin D. Williamson, May 4, 2016, right after Donald Trump secured the votes to be the Republican presidential nominee.

But he was wrong about something: he has had “occasions to link back to it” for years, not several months.

Williamson has another epochal column, Witless Ape Rides Escalator with perhaps the most on-point succinct summary of that ape:

[W]hen Trump sings “How Great Thou Art,” he sings it in a mirror.

When Ruy Teixeira talks

When Ruy Teixeira talks (Republicans Really Are the Party of the Working Class), Democrats should listen attentively.

In a lot of ways, the reversal of party affiliation by the white working class, in increasingly by “POCs” in the working class, is the most astonishing part of the realignment since witless ape rode escalator.

Elite Populism

There is an elite version of populism that masquerades as technocracy.

Jonah Goldberg

Freddie on “all that politics is”

I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been observed that Trump’s fundamental political proposition is not really populism, or foreign policy isolationism, or economic protectionism. Trump’s political pitch is, simply, “I will destroy your enemies.” Which is part of what makes him a monster, his zeal for attacking his targets and the targets he picks. But when I see people who favor police and prison abolition exactly up until the police and prisons become useful tools to them, it convinces me even more that “I will destroy your enemies” is all that politics is. When you scrape the surface even a little bit, that’s all that you find, the will to destroy the other side.

Freddie deBoer, May "Destroy My Enemies" Be All of Our Law

I do not agree with Freddie on “all that politics is,” but he’s got an awfully good point about Trump.

Freddie gems

  • I am waiting for someone to tell me what the radical left approach to law and order adds up to, these days, other than an injunction against ever calling the cops for anything and people screaming on Twitter that it’s fine if you smoke meth in a crowded elevator. No one has taken me up on the offer to explain how any of this works. Because none of it works, and it’s not clear if it was ever intended to work as an actionable set of proposals. It’s all pose, all fashion. Three years after “defund the police” became a ubiquitous slogan in left spaces, nobody knows what it means, nobody feels any pressure to figure that out, but everyone is still sure that if you expect any enforcement of basic order at all, you’re a fascist.
  • Trump stood for very little in any conventional political terms, barely attempted to define a political agenda on the campaign trail, and was most notable in policy terms for his willingness to defend Medicare and Social Security after Paul Ryan’s former stranglehold on Republican fiscal ideals. Instead, he offered the ritualistic scourging of the people his fans found detestable – first in the primary, mocking John McCain and Jeb Bush and whoever else stood in his way, then the effete liberals who were allowing immigrants and criminals to ruin the country. His potential successor, Ron Desantis, is something of an idea man, but he tilts those ideas towards the urge to destroy constantly. His signature policies are all oriented towards reminding voters that he will target their enemies and use government to oppose them. He has to; it’s a political necessity for a 21st-century Republican with great ambitions.
  • What all of us have to recognize is that the nihilism and score-settling of the past seven years are not the fault of a single awful man but emergent properties of a toxicity deeply embedded in the guts of this country. We can’t cure that toxicity if we spend all of our time diagnosing it in the other side. Of course I think Republicans are mostly to blame. But that belief tells us nothing about how to build a better, healthier political culture.

Freddie deBoer

Indirect evidence on gun control

Here’s the funny thing: while conservatives balk at even the mildest gun control efforts on account of it being a slippery slope (fine), progressives have absolutely no intention of enforcing even existing gun control laws. What could I mean by this? Just listen to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner this week on how his office won’t prosecute illegal gun possession:

We do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings,” the DA’s office said.

This is the ur-progressive prosecutor, saying gun control doesn’t stop shootings and that he’s just not going to do it. Because enforcing gun control laws would mean—it’s almost too terrible to say—enforcing laws. And that’s a line that America’s progressive prosecutors simply cannot cross.

Nellie Bowles

Gun control gets a boost every time there’s a mass shooting, especially of schoolchildren. But when you get into the weeds, the details, where the devil notoriously lurks, it’s far from obvious what to do. We can wish that we’d never become so gun-infatuated as a nation, but we did.

Kevin D. Williamson demolishes (as have countless others before him) the case against the AR-15 in The Washington Post Misfires—Again. The only thing particularly dangerous about the AR-15 seems to be its cool factor, its status as an icon of toughness.

So what now? “Do something! (however symbolic, ill-advised or constitutionally provocative)” is not an answer I’ll accept.

Challenge

Purity … is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

William James

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 1:27

I’ve done the hard part, gathering the epigraphs. Would you now like to write the essay?

(H/T James K.A. Smith, by whose standard these epigraphs are far too direct for the essay I might write.)

Curiosities

Notable oddity to add a little seasoning to life: Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park

Wordplay

Anisogamy: Sexual reproduction involving two types of gametes that differ in size.

Walking:

  • All horsepower corrupts. (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
  • Walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth.” (Rebecca Solnit)
  • I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in. (John Muir)
  • I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees. (Henry David Thoreau)

Via Andrew McCarthy

If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Al Mohler, 2016. “By 2020, Mohler had nonetheless become a public supporter of Trump, even standing by his vote for Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. ‘Based upon the binary choice we faced on November the third, I believe then that that was the right action to take,’ Mohler said on his podcast on January 7, 2021. ‘And going back to November the third, I would do the same thing again.’ To my knowledge, Mohler has yet to issue an apology to Bill Clinton.” (Robert P. Jones, Why a Trump indictment will matter so little to most of his Christian supporters)

Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

Isaiah 37:36 (King James Version)

‘Traditional art invites a look’, she wrote. ‘[Modernist art] engenders a stare’. The stare is not known for building bridges with others, or the world at large: instead it suggests alienation, either a need to control, or a feeling of terrified helplessness.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (I don’t recall who he was quoting.)

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.

Jean Baudrillard

The irony of Chat GTP asking me to verify I’m a human

@philbowell on micro.blog

… the difference between what Rowling says she believes and what her critics claim she does ….

J.K. Rowling Addresses Her Critics

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Ides of March 2023

Culture

Obituary — Traute Lafrenz

As the German Army faced crushing losses at Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943, the White Rose sensed mistakenly that military reverses would turn Germans against Hitler. The group’s fliers, quoting from Goethe, Schiller, Aristotle, Lao Tzu and the Bible, urged passive resistance and sabotage of the Nazi project.

“Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days?” the first leaflet asked. “Who among us can imagine the degree of shame that will come upon us and upon our children when the veils fall from our faces and the awful crimes that infinitely exceed any human measure are exposed to the light of day?”

From the New York Times obituary for Traute Lafrenz, the last survivor of the German Resistance group White Rose.

Note particularly the first sentence, which strikes me as relevant to the current political popularity of certain creeps and losers.

Picking the lesser evil

As much as I object to the sloppy practices of some gender clinics and to their widely-reported unseemly haste to “transition” (i.e., mutilate) adolescents, there is a case for balancing harms, and for giving great weight to the question “who decides?”

That comes forcefully to mind as I watch ham-handed limelight-seekers in legislatures trying to solve the trans social contagion with something close to outright bans on any approach to adolescent gender dysphoria other than “watchful waiting.” I think doctors should do a lot more watchful waiting than they have been, but when I saw the legislative response, I realized it may be best for legislators to stay out of it if they can’t do any better than that — and it may be that they legitimately cannot.

If “patient, parents and physician decide” prevails, it will mean (in the current, white-hot mania) many lives ruined with the only recourse being a malpractice action, not restoration of full health. But that imperfect outcome may just be the best we can do.

(I wrote this before reading Andrew Sullivan’s Substack, which made an analogous point.)

How to treat critics of democracy

It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy—even if they are enemies of democracy—provided they are thinking men (and especially great thinkers) and not blustering fools.

Leo Strauss via Michael Millerman at First Things

Go thou and do likewise, HRC

When the Berlin Wall fell, the Committee for the Free World, a neoconservative think tank, closed its doors. Its director, Midge Decter, concluded that it had served its purpose and so should dissolve. Gay-rights organizations [e.g., Human Rights Campaign] chose a different path after Obergefell. Rather than declare victory and go home, they moved on to the “next frontier”: transgender rights. Religious conservatives had already been largely eliminated from important American institutions, and so posed no internal obstacle to the pursuit of this goal. Feminists, who remained, mostly went along with the idea that men could become women. Those who chose to speak were labeled “TERFs” and targeted with the same arsenal of social, professional, and financial threats that had once been deployed against opponents of same-sex marriage.

Matthew Schmitz, How Gay Marriage Changed America by Matthew Schmitz

Ginger Prince welcomes “dialog”

The ginger Prince is “open” to talking with the family, “to help them understand their unconscious bias.” We all know what this type of “dialogue” means coming from one who feels victimized. It means that you talk and talk until you agree with them. It is pointless to disagree with those who carefully nurture their sense of victimhood, the perpetually aggrieved, whether it be your crazy cousin or the former President.

Terry Cowan, Spare Me

Learning from Armenians

I asked every person I met if they felt any hate—toward the Turks, or the Azeris, or anyone else who imperiled Armenia or turned a blind eye to their fate. The question struck them all as strange. “Why would I feel hate?” a former senior government official responded over espressos and biscotti. “There are so many other, more productive things to feel and do.”

… [U]nless I’ve been gravely misinformed, if it throws in for nothing else, surely Christianity is bullish on hope. Americans should take note. Stateside, hope is in short supply.

Liel Leibovitz

Journalism

Bothsidesism failure

Here I would remind you that Chris Cuomo had his entire media career destroyed because he gave a politician (his brother) back-channel advice concerning a specific incident without disclosing it.

Which is proper: What Cuomo did was 100 percent out of bounds. CNN was right to fire him. It’s good that no other mainstream outlet has hired him.

My point is that in the “liberal mainstream media,” Chris Cuomo got the professional equivalent of the death penalty for an offense that was a tiny fraction of the size of what happens up and down the line at Fox every forking day. And the Fox people will face zero consequences for their infinitely greater sins.

But, hey, the liberal mainstream media got the Covington kids story wrong for 24 hours, so, what are you gonna do, right? Both sides?

Jonathan V. Last, Spoiler: Fox Wins

I almost added emphasis, but surely you can read or re-read four short paragraphs and get the point.

With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged

I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of [Bill O’Reilly’s] schtick. The schtick is built on this perception that he is the character he plays. He is Everyman … fighting for you against the powers that be. And that’s great as a schtick. But the moment that it’s revealed not to be true, it’s over.

Tucker Carlson in 2003, via Andrew Sullivan.

Politics

What is “woke”?

This is what I mean when I use the term “woke”: the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture. Note that for the most part this is about society and not politics as normally defined. Democrats (at least outside of the very bluest districts) aren’t running for office on a woke agenda. Plenty of people tried to in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but the least woke candidate among them (Joe Biden) prevailed, showing that America’s left-leaning party keeps one foot firmly planted in the unwoke liberal center-left, where I make my ideological home.

Yet Republicans haven’t responded at the level of civil society. Instead, prodded by rabblerousing right-wing digital activists like Christopher Rufo, they have sought to combat wokeness using the blunt force of government power—by banning books, curtailing what can be taught in schools, imposing penalties on private companies for taking progressive stands on social and cultural issues, and seizing control of public universities to prevent them from teaching the “wrong” things and following DEI mandates in their hiring decisions.

Republicans justify these aggressive moves by claiming that wokeness isn’t just a problem but a huge problem, a massive problem, maybe even the biggest problem facing the country. In this respect, wokeness has become a successor in their minds to communism—a totalitarian ideology of the left that threatens to destroy all that’s good and great about America and that therefore needs to be rooted out by any means necessary. (Some on the right make the connection to communism explicit by describing wokeness as a form of “cultural Marxism.” Since I see the phenomenon primarily as a form of post-Protestant Christianity, I avoid using the term.)

…

[N]othing would do more to empower wokeness as a grassroots phenomenon than sending DeSantis to the White House, where he would fight moral illiberalism with political illiberalism, in the process turning left-wing activists into martyrs for freedom and democracy.

We can’t fight wokeness by smashing it politically. We can only fight it by convincing liberal-minded people in powerful positions within private and public institutions that they should stand up to and resist it. Which may be just another way of saying that the key to stopping wokeism is a reaffirmation of liberalism.

Damon Linker

Making your adversaries second-class citizens

I think David French succeeded today in identifying why I find our polarized politics so worrisome:

The Constitution of the United States, properly interpreted, provides a marvelous method for handling social conflict. It empowers an elected government to enact even contentious new rules while protecting the most fundamental human rights of dissenting citizens. Political defeat is never total defeat. Losers of a given election still possess their basic civil liberties, and the combination of the right to speak and the right to vote provides them concrete hope for their preferred political outcomes.

But if a government both enacts contentious policies and diminishes the civil liberties of its current ideological opponents, then it sharply increases the stakes of political conflict. It breaks the social compact by rendering political losers, in effect, second-class citizens. A culture war waged against the civil liberties of your political opponents inflicts a double injury on dissenters: They don’t merely lose a vote; they also lose a share of their freedom.

That’s exactly what’s happening now. The culture war is coming for American liberty — in red states and blue alike. The examples are legion ….

I think the link will get you through the NYT paywall.

The kinds of laws French identifies offend me in another way: they reflect the contempt of legislators and governors for their oaths to uphold the Constitution, inasmuch as many of these laws are unconstitutional substantively or because they’re so vague that a reasonable person cannot discern where the lien is between lawful and unlawful. And it’s a black mark against Ron DeSantis that he supports several of them.

And don’t get me started on the smarmy governor of California, who … no, I don’t want to get started.

Heuristics to counteract gaslighting

In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth — and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment view or the consensus position, you’re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.

Ross Douthat, A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies This bubbled up among Readwise clips recently.

It seems to me that as we enter the age of AI-generated fake news, the heuristics Douthat commends for conspiracy theories will be doing double-duty.

Election 2024 storm clouds

Ross Douthat, Trump Knows How to Make Promises. Do His Rivals? is well worth reading if you don’t mind the gist: that Trump will win the GOP nomination.

Smart takes, dumb takes

There will be two populist right-wing critiques of SVB, I suspect, more complementary than contradictory.

The smart one, laid out by Ramaswamy in his detailed analysis of SVB’s mismanagement, is that a bailout will create more problems for the country long-term than would letting the bank fail and leaving its depositors in temporary financial limbo. Customers with millions or billions of dollars in assets suddenly have no great incentive to ensure that they’re banking with a responsible institution now that the feds have agreed to backstop irresponsible ones. Better to let SVB’s clients suffer and thereby incentivize other American businesses to do greater diligence in deciding where to park their money. The best-run banks will get the lion’s share of the deposits. Free-market competition, in all its glory.

That’s impressively logical but too pat, I think, at a moment of panic. Panic is the enemy of logic; once bank runs begin, even banks that did things the right way might be overrun and broken as customers rush to move their money. And that money won’t be moved to better-run midsize banks, it’ll be moved to Wall Street giants for maximum safety.

Still, Ramaswamy’s basic point, that markets will reward and punish the right people more fairly and efficiently than the government can, is well taken. Smart critique.

Then there’s the not-so-smart one.

They were one of the most woke banks

(Republican Congressman James Comer, via Aaron Rupar on Twitter via Nick Cattogio)

To borrow Joe Biden’s line about Rudy Giuliani, many Trump-era Republicans are so invested in culture war that they can’t get through a sentence without a noun, a verb, and “woke,” or some variation thereof.

Close encounters

Duck!

For the first time ever, I set aside my annual vehicle registration papers and forgot to send them in. So I appeared at the BMV in person to remedy the problem.

O felix culpa! I got my first up close look at 7’4″ 305 pound Zach Edey, likely NCAA Men’s player of the year. (Eventually, my number was called and I was seated to his immediate left.)

Yes, he has to duck for every doorway. Duck quite a lot, actually.

Another close encounter

As long as we’re doing photos and stories of close encounters (well, I am anyway), I’ll reminisce about a choral experience.

Singing under the late William Jon Gray, our serious amateur chorus usually hired soloists for our major works, generally sacred classics like masses and oratorios. One Spring as we were warming up for the concert, Mr. Gray introduced us to our tenor soloist, brought in from the Jacobs School at Indiana University, mingled in with the tenor section for warmups, but who had not even joined us in dress rehearsal (unusual).

Ladies and gentleman, I’d like to introduce you to our tenor soloist today, Lawrence Brownlee. Enjoy him, because we’ll never be able to afford him again: he won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions this week.

I promised a picture, but it’s not of our concert. You may recognize the famous lady Lawrence accompanied in this Met production:

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Tuesday, 3/7/23

Culture

Journalism

Following the herd

It also makes sense to assume that Fox’s behavior will change if it ends up losing this [Dominion] lawsuit. I certainly think it will. Specifically, the people who work there will take care not to put it in writing the next time they quietly conspire to smear someone into oblivion.

…

Murdoch’s shop has always followed the herd, a reminder that its core mission was and remains to advocate for its audience’s political priorities, not to provide them with news. Especially when the news happens to contradict those priorities.

…

If you happened to tune into Fox [February 2] you found [Tucker] Carlson still at it more than a year later, promising fans that he’s unearthed video that’ll soon prove the government is “lying” about the insurrection.

Nick Cattogio

Folk wisdom

  • “The time to decide whether or not you want to kill a deer is before you go hunting.”
  • “If you don’t want to get a haircut, don’t hang around the barbershop.”

Wisdom via Chris Stirewalt, who preaches a eulogy of sorts for Bill Sammons, late of Fox News, who definitely decided to kill the deer.

Generally

Flipping the script on its head

I ask Oizumi why he is so drawn to this country. “I like to go places where there are people with a real history. In Korea, that same tribe, that same culture has been there for a very long time.” “Well,” I say, “Europe has a long history too.” “No way! That place is frightening.” “Frightening?” “Yes. I went to Italy, Spain, Milan, Florence, and all the buildings were made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. Now, how did they make that? That would take a tremendous amount of energy. In those days there were no bulldozers. Everything was done by hand. A place with that many stone buildings would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that I thought, Wow, Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days.

San Oizumi, profiled by Andy Couterier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

Boors

We are offended only by those who are boorish in the way that working class people are boorish, not by those who are boorish in the way that our powerful classes are boorish.

J Budziszewski

Destined for obsolescence?

To the extent that a Disney production manifests the sort of obvious and literal-minded progressive messaging that might outrage some Republican official, it is already failing by the Mouse’s own standards and is destined for obsolescence no matter what. What survives to become fixed in the Disney canon has to feel deeply in tune with its vast and bipartisan audience even when there’s some kind of ideological vision underneath. Politics is welcome in the temple but never nakedly or openly, never crudely — only clothed in the robes of princesses and filtered through the lyrics of Howard Ashman or Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Ross Douthat

Teaching in Prison

I expected much less than College Should Be More Like Prison delivered. Excerpts:

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

…

In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

The author gives a lot of credit to the absence of cell phones and internet connections.

Breaking Covenant

I think the truth is that we have been breaking our covenants with students for quite some time. The rise in student debt is a broken covenant. Adjunctification is a broken covenant. The fact that at some research universities a significant portion of student tuition pays faculty to not teach is a broken covenant. According to this study from Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor at Cal Berkeley, 40 percent of student tuition at his institution goes toward funding departmental research.

Renewing Higher Education’s Covenants

Legalia

Mind Blown

Pardon me while I briefly geek out on constitutional legalia.

As a threshold matter, I’m not even certain the Establishment Clause can be incorporated. … Akhil Amar has written … that this federalism provision prevents the federal government from interfering with state established churches. ‌But that ship has probably sailed.

Josh Blackman, Ending the Epicycles of the Establishment Clause.

I’m quite certain that the original meaning of the establishment clause was that the federal government could not lawfully interfere with state established churches. Fer cryin’ out loud, people, Massachusetts had an established Congregational Church into the 1830s and nobody thought it was uncontitutional.

Perhaps it also meant that the federal government could not lawfully establish its own national church; that would be nice.

But it never occurred to me that because the Establishment Clause was a federalism provision, it’s illegitimate to use the anti-slavery Civil War Amendments to apply it to the states (the “incorporation doctrine”).

So Indiana could still establish Preacher Boy Billy-Bob’s Landmark Baptist Church as the state religion. That would not be nice.

Politics

Damon Linker: Ron DeSantis Is Not a Fascist

Tens of millions of our fellow citizens don’t like where they think our country is headed, and they’re expressing that dislike at the ballot box. The response to them shouldn’t be you’re not allowed to dislike and attempt to change the country’s direction. The response should be here are reasons why you should be less hostile to recent trends and more fearful that the illiberal reforms you favor will end up making you less free in the long run, too

Damon Linker, Ron DeSantis Is Not a Fascist

One of the most impressive things about Barack Obama was that he could make the conservative case more eloquently than 90% of conservatives. One of the most infuriating things about him was he would then do the progressive thing — invariably in the Senate, oftener than not as President.

Damon Linker had replicated that impressive feat with contemporary right-illiberals, like Ron DeSantis. But he remains a liberal (center-left, I’d say). The linked column (and I think the link will get you to it for free) is one of his best and is food for productive thought both for right-illiberals (or those tempted by it) and liberals of both left and right.

The fashy essence of authoritarian populism

[P]er his keynote speech at CPAC on Saturday, it appears the coming campaign will be Trump Unleashed.

My hat is off to whichever speechwriter came up with the line “I am your retribution.” With remarkable efficiency, it divines the fashy essence of authoritarian populism.

Nick Cattogio

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Friday, 2/24/23

It’s our purported son’s 47th birthday. I say “purported” because we clearly are not old enough to have a 47-year-old.

On the other hand, my late cousin Dutch and his wife were grandparents at 35. Hmmm.

Culture

Journalism and informational overload

Asymmetrical ideological inconveniences

For all their anxiety about media gatekeeping, you’re more likely to find news that’s inconvenient for the left in the New York Times than news that’s inconvenient for the right on a conservative website. People who earn a living complaining about collusion between Democrats and liberal journalists had no issue with Trump treating one Fox News host as his “shadow chief of staff” and patching in another via speaker phone to weigh in during Oval Office meetings. The Venn diagram of populist outlets that screech endlessly about media corruption and populist outlets being sued for defamation for lying about the 2020 election is basically a circle.

Nick Cattogio

Bombarded by “Datapoints”

  • The sum of our daily bombardment with information is to overwhelm and deplete our cognitive resources.
  • [F]rom someone’s perspective, we are all conspiracy theorizers now. We are all in the position of holding beliefs, however sure we may be of them, that some non-trivial portion of the population considers not just mistaken but preposterous and paranoid … [or] rather than saying that we are all conspiracy theorizers now, I should say that we are all, from someone’s perspective, cult members now.

L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society

Vindication is maybe a little too sweet

The indispensable journalist Jesse Singal, who has written a great deal about hasty “transitioning” of adolescents presenting with something like gender dysphoria, faced an alarming challenge: the author of part of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s Standard of Care said Singal had misinterpreted what he wrote and had failed to call for confirmation of his interpretation.

Except it turned out that his challenger wasn’t the author. And Singal hadn’t misinterpreted what the real co-authors wrote. And what they wrote is pretty commonsensical. Singal’s defenders rejoiced, perhaps to excess, at his vindication:

Ever since I have started writing about this issue, a subset of genuinely immoral people in academia and media have tried very hard to lie about my writing on this subject and, in some more extreme cases, destroy my reputation with straightforwardly defamatory claims. My work is by no means perfect or above critique, and I’ve made mistakes, but there’s a chasm that’s light years wide between what I’ve written and what a subset of my critics insist on maliciously and performatively pretending I’ve written.

Could anything better symbolize this than an academic popping up to wrongly accuse me of misrepresenting his work, and of not reaching out to him beforehand, only for it to turn out that he didn’t even write the thing he claimed to have written? Over and over, I tweeted at the people who had jumped on the bandwagon against me, demanding deletions and apologies (my batting average wasn’t great on the apologies front). It was not a good use of my time, and of course my lack of grace here certainly didn’t improve the overall Twitter climate on this issue (and so many others): the debate over youth gender medicine really is treated like a team spectator sport rather than a matter requiring humility, nuance, and compassion. My “enemies” were thrilled that I had been humiliated, and they performed the online equivalent of beating up a me-shaped piñata, and then my “allies” were thrilled at the dramatic turnabout and gave Edmiston the same treatment.

I’m certainly not saying that my actions and his were equivalent; he was the aggressor, he publicly launched a false accusation at me, and he badly misrepresented his role working on the WPATH SoC. Rather, I am saying that the hysterical pitch of Twitter exacerbates everything, and that I threw fuel on the fire because I was so tired of years of defamatory bullshit and had finally achieved the sort of nigh-indisputable, 120-decibel vindication I’d often longed for during these profoundly asinine blowups.

It’s quite a tale if you’re interested.

Distraction

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole – by Damon Linker

It’s become quite common among readers of Strauss to recognize that his mature writings (from roughly the early 1940s on) contain two teachings: a morally edifying surface message for public consumption and another, deeper, more subversive teaching fit only for his most careful and discerning readers. This is how Strauss claimed the greatest works in the history of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks on down to the late 19<sup>th</sup> century were written, and it’s now widely assumed the often-elliptical formulations and unresolved paradoxes in his own books and essays point to the same strategy in his own work.

The challenge, as always, is deciphering the hidden, or “esoteric,” teaching and separating it out from the surface, or “exoteric,” message.

Smith, following Canadian author Shadia Drury and others, including Alamariu, suggests that Strauss’ esoteric teaching is, in most respects, indistinguishable from Nietzsche’s: radically inegalitarian, contemptuous toward democracy, thoroughly anti-Christian, and favoring a strict aristocratic hierarchy with Great Philosophers who break violently and gleefully from the restraints of ordinary morality, patriotism, and piety at the tippy-top.

Damon Linker, Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole

Masks

The results are in, and there’s no evidence that mask mandates, alone or in combination with other preventive measures, made any difference in Covid transmission. But the CDC is unbowed:

When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.‌

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

There were people who “knew” masks were useless before evidence warranted their certainty, and we should not hold them up as prophets now. I, for one, went along with the CDC, but fully aware at the time that (a) they were motivated by the demand that “somebody do something!” and (b) there were some reasons (mask filtration data, size of the virus, etc.) to think they were scripting mere hygiene theater.

I sing in one small choir that continues to rehearse and sing masked — for the supposed benefit of the immunocompromised spouse of one singer. Part of me wanted to trumpet these results and demand an end to our masking; part of me wants to just quietly quit the choir at the end of this season; part of me … well, it’s a long story and I don’t want to hold the group up for derision. Moreover, there’s this important qualification:

[T]he analysis does not prove that proper masks, properly worn, had no benefit at an individual level. People may have good personal reasons to wear masks, and they may have the discipline to wear them consistently.

Dang!

(Source: Bret Stephens, who’s discussing a survey by “Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data.”)

It’s Nellie Bowles Day!

It’s Friday (as I write), which means that Nellie Bowles has brought forth another TGIF collection

  • Pfizer is dropping a fellowship that wasn’t open to white or Asian applicants, after civil rights lawyers reminded them that’s super illegal.
  • NPR cutting 10 percent of its staff: The public radio station—that is, in part, taxpayer funded—is losing money and needs to cut staff. I can’t point to an institution that has more fully failed its mission than NPR, which went from fulfilling a genuine public service with news and great stories (I’m thinking of early This American Life) to just another hyper-partisan maker of mush. Tote bags and mush.

And a longer one:

University DEI admins come up with their perfect replacement: Vanderbilt University’s office of diversity issued a statement consoling students about a recent mass shooting at Michigan State. But apparently they are so very busy that they used AI to write it.

Let me back up: last week, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae—who had previously pleaded down a felony charge that would have prevented him from possessing a gun—slaughtered three students, seemingly at random, on Michigan State’s campus.

In response, Vanderbilt’s equity workers released a touching statement about how everyone needs to be kind and inclusive to, I guess, prevent mass shootings by nearby career criminals: “Another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding.” And: “[L]et us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus.” And: “Finally, we must recognize that creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment.” It’s the same nonsensical but warm sentiment said over and over—inclusive (7 times), community (5 times), safe (3)—and it kinda worked!

Except at the bottom of the statement was this sentence: Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023.

People were upset. The university apologized. And yes, you could ask what exactly these bureaucrats are doing all day. But their laziness might also be their genius: replace all university bureaucrats with ChatGPT. Like the discovery of penicillin, sometimes accidents make genius.

The saddest part may be that if Vanderbilt Administrators hadn’t slipped up and included the footer, nobody would have suspected that this wasn’t just more bureaucratic pabulum.

Odd empowerment

…

Not only is the statue not fully human, it is not an attempt to depict a real woman, with the exception of having a collar as a tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Not one historical woman was judged worthy of receiving the honor by [artist Shahzia] Sikander.

The statue has some resemblance to women in its figure, but it is then changed and warped into something nonhuman and nonfemale. Its hair forms horns and the arms become tentacles. The face is void and harsh. The statue clearly plays on Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in which the deity rises from a clamshell, but whereas Venus is the epitome of the feminine form, this one is deliberately smoothed over. It is a depiction of a neutered woman, a woman who must lose and transcend her femininity in order to be empowered.

…

The statue represents two great deceptions foisted upon women in modern society. To be empowered, women must intentionally diminish their femininity and to succeed in life necessitates delaying motherhood and, if necessary, sacrificing one’s own child. Far from empowering, this message treats femininity as inherently lesser than masculinity; it then is a worldview that can never affirm women as women.

…

Sarah Stewart, Value and True Femininity

Pornodynamics

Free-speech defences of porn treat ‘individual choice’ as a static matter than can be controlled by the principle of avoiding harm. The Second Law of Pornodynamics argues that the inexorable consequence of normalising porn will be systemic harm, and as such all porn should be brutally repressed.

…

[T]he sequel to “Porn will always exist” tends to be “and so we should normalise, regulate and contain it”, with the unspoken subtext “… and make money out of it without being socially ostracised.”

Mary Harrington, The Three Laws of Pornodynamics. Don’t overlook “and make money out of it.”

I don’t write much about pornography because, thank God, I rarely think about the harder-core versions (i.e., excluding the soft-core porn that is much of prime-time and "reputable" streaming videos today). I have it on good authority, though, that it’s pandemic, not excluding "good" kids.

Blasphemy, old and new

[I]t’s not possible to have a functioning society without restrictions on speech and actions that violate that society’s sacred values. For without some sacred values, you don’t have a society, just chaos and conflict. This is still understood by those Muslim believers who react with anger (and sometimes worse) when nonbelievers insult the Prophet.

…

[I]f something looks a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And when a movement with an instantly recognisable symbol, a distinctive metaphysics (identity precedes biology, all desire must be celebrated) and a calendar of feast days celebrated by governments, corporations, universities and public bodies acquires the ability to punish those who deface its symbols, the only possible thing you can call it is an emerging faith – one with a tightening grip on institutional power across the West.

…

Of course it remains to be seen whether this faith will prevail, or be replaced by something still newer and stranger. The point is: forget the marketplace of ideas. Forget the secular interregnum. It’s over: even if you personally are still among the number mumbling about civil debate and tolerance, you’re surrounded by a growing array of factions who don’t play by those rules.

Mary Harrington, Blasphemy is dead. Long live blasphemy.

The stars must have aligned

I have no idea what this means, but on Friday Peggy Noonan and David French both published admiring articles about Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise Speech.”

You’re welcome.

Snowbirds

Northerners go to Florida to find happiness and after about thirty-six hours they realize that climate does not solve their problems: even though it’s 75 degrees, they still are themselves and that’s their problem. They feel isolated, their life is purposeless, they believe stuff they know is not true.

Garrison Keillor

Politics

There he goes again

Chuck Schumer once again is backing more extreme Republican primary candidates who he thinks will be easy enough to beat in the general election:

I’m not immune to the pushback that it’s the voters’ faults. Sure. Kind of. If the ads said, “This person is a lunatic and is being backed by the Democrats because that’s how sure they are that he can’t win a general,” I’d be totally on board. If the ads just said, “This person has repeatedly said the 2020 election was stolen,” I’d be pretty close. But that’s not what they say!

“Janel Brandtjen is as conservative as they come,” reads a postcard sent to Republican voters from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which calls her “a conservative pro-Trump Republican.”

The TV ads being run by the presumptive Democratic nominee note that their preferred Republican won an award for being “pro-life legislator of the year” from a state organization.

A candidate who otherwise would have very little funding and low name recognition is suddenly up on television and in every voter’s mailbox as the “conservative pro-Trump Republican.”

I don’t think it’s entirely fair to “blame voters” at that point ….

Sarah Isgur, The Sweep

Kamala Harris is going nowhere

Speaking of the 25th Amendment, there is a part of it with which many Americans are not familiar: If Biden wants to nominate a new secretary of state or a Supreme Court justice, this requires the approval of the Senate—but if the president wishes to choose a new vice president, this requires the approval of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which currently is under Republican control. There are many Democrats who wish to be rid of Vice President Kamala Harris, whom they have rightly judged to be a political liability with no likely political future of her own, but the only way Biden is getting rid of Harris is by dumping her from the ticket and getting reelected in 2024. It is very difficult to imagine House Republicans voting to approve any new vice president Biden might conceivably choose. Mitch McConnell took a lot of heat for running out the clock on Merrick Garland but, far from paying a political price for this, he harvested a bumper crop of political benefits. Kevin McCarthy, who serves at the mercy of a dozen or so howling moonbats, would have no incentive at all to help Biden replace Harris—and with the vice presidency vacant, McCarthy would be second in line to the presidency with only the oldest-ever incumbent between him and the Oval Office. That’s a storyline more appropriate to a political thriller, but it is something to keep in mind if your current Kremlinology tells you Harris is going anywhere.

Biden is stuck with Harris, and Democrats—and the country—are, it seems, stuck with the both of them, however doddering the man in charge of the executive branch of the federal government may be. It is tempting to write that with only a little sensible political calculation, Republicans could put themselves in an unbeatable situation. But if you think the coming election is foolproof, then you don’t know the fools in question.

Kevin D. Williamson

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ejaculation

On Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ejaculation about a Red State/Blue State “divorce”:

Neither political tribe finds much satisfaction in the United States as it actually is and in Americans as they actually are. That is because the United States of America is a real place full of real people rather than an exercise in ideological (more genuinely tribal) wish-fulfillment.

Kevin D. Williamson

As befits Kevin D. Williamson, there’s much more to his column than that bit.

Cowards

[Ted] Cruz and [Josh] Hawley know that what Trump was trying to do was unconstitutional and would, if successful, gut the Constitution and perhaps even democracy. They simply lacked the courage to tell the snowflakes what they don’t want to hear, so instead they lent aid and comfort to the atrocity this week.

Jonah Goldberg, January 8, 2021.

Shorts

Home

Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Rhodes Scholars

… Pete Buttigieg, the man who is proving single-handedly that Rhodes Scholars are overhyped.

Nellie Bowles

And if you eat the yellow snow?

[W]hen you sit down on ice, you get polaroids.

Garrison Keillor

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Tuesday 2/21/23

Personal

Last October, I began wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM).

My diabetes has never been bad. I’ve never needed insulin. The Family Practitioner who started me on Piaglitazone and Metformin never even uttered the word “diabetes.” He said “I’m going to put you on some meds to control your blood sugar, which is a bit too high.” Soon he dropped the Piaglitazone.

Since my Doc was sort of proactive, I suspect that I never actually made it past “pre-diabetes,” which I think is pretty much the same as “metabolic syndrome.” I’ve known I had metabolic syndrome/pre-diabetes for more than 30 years. And while my doctors (past and present) seemed to consider my A1C of 6.2 pretty good, I looked at it, and at the scale, and eventually said “maybe I put weight on so easily because of what high blood sugar does,” and began thinking that CGM technology might help me control that.

That thought became a reality shortly thereafter when I learned of Levels Health. Through them, I got a Dexcom G6 CGM. This is my personal, subjective report.

First, using a CGM requires some acclimation. Levels didn’t mention that CGM sensors only last about 10 days, and each one measures serum glucose differently. I had to figure that out by looking at the Dexcom app and puzzling over the blank next to “last calibration date.” Yes, you do need to calibrate your CGM sensor unless you want merely to get an idea of the direction your serum glucose is moving twelve times an hour.

Thus, second, the ads for Dexcom that say “no more finger pricks” are exaggerating. You need finger pricks in order to calibrate the new CGM sensor. In my experience, I really need two finger-pricks per sensor: one when glucose is low, another when it’s high. I only calibrated my current sensor at low glucose, and I’m all but positive that it’s exaggerating the rise caused by benign meals that have not been a problem before. Still, two finger-pricks in ten days is much better than what some diabetics experience.

Third, there’s only one good place on my arms to wear a CGM, and if I sleep on that arm with a CGM, it’s apt to disrupt the sensor’s operation. What that means is that my phone is likely to erupt in the dead of night with shrill false alarms (overriding the “off” switch on the phone) of dangerously low blood sugar. Were I frankly diabetic, especially Type I, that no-opt-out alarm might save my life, but for me it’s a definite bug, not a feature.

Fourth, in my experience, the area where I habitually insert the CGM sensor becomes sensitive, giving off stinging sensations and other unpleasant sensations at times.

Fifth, my CGM sensors have intermittent outages where they cease communicating with the app. For that reason, I hesitate to push my luck by swimming or sinking into a hot bathtub, even though that’s supposed to be okay for up to 20 minutes. My hygiene grade is down a bit.

Sixth, it really is interesting, after 30+ years of metabolic syndrome, to watch in more objective terms how a single meal can send my glucose soaring, with all that implies.

Seventh, it worked. I dropped my A1C from 6.2 to 5.7 in four months. I lost a modest amount of weight. Then my new doctor (the old one, younger than me, retired) monkey-wrenched things by saying that he didn’t like diabetics to have A1C that low, for fear of their blood sugar dropping dangerously low. (The likelihood of me ever observing a diet so strictly that I drive my blood sugar too low seems vanishingly low.) I also broke through a weight-loss plateau, though total weight loss with CGM remains modest.

Eighth (and here I pivot), it turns out that controlling serum glucose, for me at least, means eating a low-carbohydrate diet. I know how to do that without a monitor.

Finally, there’s something about CGM that feels to me like biohacking, like quantifying things that really require only generality, like being a control freak. And biohacking seems adjacent to transhumanism, with which I want nothing whatever to do.

So I have told Levels not to ship my next CGM order. I plan to continue a low-carb diet. I plan to do occasional pin-pricks before and after planned binges. If you are pre-diabetic or put weight on too easily, I would recommend giving a look at Levels Health and CGM for a while to get in touch with your very own metabolism.

I haven’t even ruled out returning to CGM during my year-long Levels Health membership. But in a few weeks, I’m done with CGM to give me “metrics” (beyond my weight) on the effects of low-carb eating.

Cultural

Thought fodder

One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs [gender clinics] now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.

Andrew Sullivan

Fox civil war

Fox news is supposed to be separate from Fox opinion, and the few times I’ve watched the former, that seems broadly true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s perfect mutual understanding and harmony:

  • On Nov. 9, 2020, host Neil Cavuto cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as she made unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on the air. For this, Fox News Senior VP (and former Trump White House press aide) Raj Shah labeled Cavuto a “brand threat” in a message to top corporate brass.
  • Hannity and Carlson tried to get Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump tweet about Dominion and noting that there was no evidence of votes being destroyed. “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck?” Carlson texted Ingraham and Hannity on Nov. 12, 2020. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Hannity exploded on top execs, including one who panicked and wrote that Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted” with Fox
  • On Nov. 19, 2020, after Fox broadcasted the now-infamous Giuliani and Powell press conference about Dominion, then-White House correspondent Kristen Fisher got in trouble for fact-checking their bogus claims. Per the filing, “Fisher received a call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, immediately after in which he emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it, and that Fisher needed to do a better job of, this is a quote, respecting our audience.”

Nick Cattogio, Fox News Hates Its Viewers

White race hucksters — it’s all about the incentives

if you want a job in DEI – especially an enviable senior position like [Rachel Elizabeth] Seidel [a/k/a Raquel Evita Saraswati] enjoys – being a person of color is explicitly an advantage, as those job listings pretty much universally list coming from a minority background as an advantage in the hiring process. If you create an advantage, people are going to pursue that advantage. Whether or not such a pursuit is ethical is not really relevant to the basic question of incentives and behavior. But like so much else in our contemporary racial conversation, there’s an element of unreality here, as every new Dolezal results in a round of shaking heads and “why would somebody do this?” But it’s obvious why they’re doing it. Progressives created the incentives that are provoking the behavior! This is the world we’ve made.

But the incentives are still unmentionable. As I wrote a couple years ago, we’re in this permanently unsettled position regarding efforts to diversify institutions: all right-thinking people are meant to support such efforts, but if you speak directly about the impact of those efforts – if you acknowledge that programs intended to benefit some minorities in a selection process result in some minorities benefitting in that selection process – then that’s an impermissible microaggression that suggests minorities aren’t deserving. I invite you to go into certain circles of Twitter and say “a lot of Black students get into Ivy League schools because of affirmative action.” You’d be pilloried. But the people pillorying you would all be supporters of affirmative action programs… which exist to get more Black students into Ivy League schools. You must support the intent of the programs but deny their effects. You need to advocate for affirmative action that helps Black and Hispanic students get into elite colleges; you are never to say that some Black and Hispanic students got into college because of affirmative action. But the latter statement forbids expressing precisely the condition endorsed by the former. It’s all deeply bizarre and a product of our permanently-enflamed racial discourse.

Freddie deBoer, We’ll Get Dolezals Until the Incentives Change

But Freddie states the other side, too:

With both the Dolezal phenomenon and affirmative action, we’re laboring under an inability to frankly reflect on racial progress and benefits that accrue to being a people of color. The reasons for this are eminently understandable; there’s a fear of taking the focus off of all the work we still have to do to achieve racial equality, and of seeming to suggest that the benefits for people of color I’m talking about are of anything like the same scale or intensity as the challenges they face. They aren’t, of course. But if part of our duty as people opposed to racism is to create social structures that address inequality, some of those structures are going to result in benefits to people of color that could potentially be exploited. The only other alternative is the kind of racial fatalism that’s admittedly quite popular, the belief that we can never create any benefits for people of color at all.

Facebook

More recent Freddie:

Facebook makes me feel the way I feel when I’m in a hospital.

Political

High admiration for the speech I despised

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

At those words, spoken by George W. Bush on January 20, 2005 (and penned by the late Michael Gerson), I repudiated my notional membership in the Republican Party. (I call it “notional” because Indiana doesn’t register voters by party, and while I consistently voted Republican primary ballots, I was never a party activist, precinct chairman or such.) I probably also uttered some sort of epithet and commented that Dubya had just declared perpetual war.

I wasn’t wrong, and I don’t regret my independence. But maybe I should have listened attentively to the rest of that second inaugural address:

I remember being startled the moment I heard the words. My ears flinched. I wasn’t sure if I had heard what I thought I had heard. I looked around at the bundled-up men and women shivering on the Mall with me to see if they had heard the same thing I had. They were politely clapping their mittened hands. I thought I caught an undercurrent of murmuring, as if they didn’t know what to make of it.

Some critics called it “messianic” and “extraordinarily ambitious,” and accused Bush of announcing a “crusade.” The conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said the speech “left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike,” because it had “no moral modesty,” no “nuance.” The goal of ending tyranny was “somewhere between dreamy and disturbing,” a case of “mission inebriation.” “This world is not heaven,” she chided. 

But, as Gerson later noted, “in the speech, this goal is immediately and carefully qualified.” Bush noted that ending tyranny “is not primarily the task of arms,” that “freedom, by its nature, must be chosen,” and that “when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own.” It was “the concentrated work of generations,” and “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.” Noonan was wrong: Bush was remarkably and explicitly humble and realistic in describing the goal of ending tyranny, which elevated his vision further. 

This was no utopian or imperial mission to conquer the world in the name of saving it. It was a statement of principle, sketching an orienting framework within which to understand who we are and what we stand for. Bush was pointing to a polestar, a single fixed point to help guide the ship of state through the storms and winds that would always come.

…

The problem with the speech’s legacy is not the presence of moral ambition, which is necessary, but that we failed to take note of the rest of the speech, after the declared goal of ending tyranny. We forget the humility and realism, and we forget that Bush went on to speak of the importance of character, integrity, and family; of community, religion, and service to others with “mercy, and a heart for the weak.” He called on Americans to embrace love for their neighbors and to “abandon all the habits of racism.” Ambition without character does indeed lead to arrogance, moral compromise, and failure, Bush seemed to be saying, even as he warned that character without ambition is too passive in the face of evil.

Paul D. Miller

Bruni on DeSantis

So now Ron DeSantis is wishy-washy. A bit of a wimp. Or at least runs the risk of looking like one.

That’s a fresh sentiment discernible in some recent assessments, as political analysts and journalists marvel at, chew over and second-guess his failure to return Donald Trump’s increasingly ugly jabs.

I wish I agreed. I’m no DeSantis fan. But where those critics spot possible weakness, I see proven discipline. Brawling with Trump doesn’t flex DeSantis’s muscle. It shows he can be baited. And it just covers them both in mud.

Frank Bruni

Supreme Court shortlist

Perry Bacon Jr. said the quiet part out loud in his Washington Post column, titled There is only one way to rein in Republican judges: Shaming them.

So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.

Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.

Bacon names and shames federal judges who halted the student loan cancellation policy (Erickson, Grasz, Pittman, and Shepherd), judges in the CFPB funding case (Engelhardt, Willett, and Wilson), and judges in a recent Second Amendment case involving domestic violence restraining orders (Wilson, Ho, and Jones). We should thank Bacon for helping to assemble the next Supreme Court shortlist.

Josh Blackman

Be it remembered …

Trump’s lying began with the crowd size of the 2017 inaugural and ended with his denial of the 2020 election results. In between these two events, it was, indeed, literally, morning, noon, and night—without ceasing.

Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Monday, 2/5/23

Culture

IVF

This battle was lost even before I entered it, so I rarely mention it. Here goes anyway.

Where the reasons for infertility are known, we are free to develop treatments to cure them. But even if we intervene in an individual’s body to restore its reproductive function, conception still might not occur. Therapeutic interventions of this sort, which are certainly admissible for a Christian who seeks to be a parent, do not seek the conception of a child. They aim to remove known obstacles so that the couple may try to conceive a child. This may seem like a small difference, but it is not. A medical treatment of this sort seeks to enable a man and a woman to conceive. It does not seek to replace their roles in conception.

Matthew Lee Anderson, The Biblical Case Against IVF. Not surprisingly, there’s much more than this to Anderson’s argument.

I agree with Anderson’s conclusion against IVF, but not necessarily for the reasons he adduces. I particularly hesitate at the label “Biblical” in the title, as I don’t think one Christian in a thousand would reason his or her way to Anderson’s conclusion given only the Bible.

What I really agree with is thinking carefully and critically about new technologies presented to us.

We’re not going to take this any more

At various times before the nineteenth century, Byzantines, Arabs, Chinese, Ottomans, Moguls, and Russians were highly confident of their strength and achievements compared to those of the West. At these times they also were contemptuous of the cultural inferiority, institutional backwardness, corruption, and decadence of the West. As the success of the West fades relatively, such attitudes reappear. People feel “they don’t have to take it anymore.”

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

I wish I’d read this book decades ago. A mind-extender.

Knowing how little we know

A world of radicals needs incrementalists to make real change, Greg German and Aubrey Fox argue in Persuasion. “Gradualists know how little they know,” they write. “Anyone trying to understand a given problem these days is necessarily missing crucial information because there is simply too much information to process effectively. Gradualists acknowledge that, inevitably, errors happen. Building on this insight, an iterative, incremental process allows for each successive generation of reformers to learn from, and improve upon, their predecessors’ efforts.” Make no mistake, they continue: “We still need dreamers and visionaries and rabble-rousers who want to pursue moon-shot goals like curing cancer and ending hunger. But our default setting should be to admit the obvious: Our problems are big and our brains are small. Incrementalism is nothing less than the endless, ongoing effort to alleviate injustices. It is a way of greeting the world in a spirit of optimism even in the face of the daily conflicts, disappointments, and tragedies that life throws at all of us.”

The Morning Dispatch

Younger and older Jefferson

Jefferson observed at one time that it would be better to have newspapers and lack a government than to have a government and be without newspapers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier.”

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

I’m a bit behind Jefferson.

TGIF

Excerpts from Nellie Bowles’ weekly TGIF

Department of horrible ideas: State Democrats in Massachusetts want to offer prisoners reduced sentences for donating organs. Yes, I’m serious. In the new bill: If you, a prisoner, go under the knife to give up a kidney or some bone marrow, you could get up to a year of your prison sentence reduced. The lawmakers say the bill would “restore bodily autonomy.“ 

What in the free-market hell is this?

…

President of Heritage calling to cut military spending? What world am I in? This week, Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote about how America needs to cut defense spending. “For too long, Republicans considered it a victory to increase defense and non-defense spending by equal dollar amounts, without cutting a dime from the deficit.” And: “Congress needs to put away its kid gloves and put the Department of Defense and other agencies alike under the knife to excise wasteful spending.” 

Getting riled up about military budgets is an age-old progressive hobby, and I still get mad looking at charts that compare U.S. military spending to every other country in the world. That Republican Heritage Foundation leaders are now saying we need to cut defense spending—and Democrats are pushing for more military spending—is amazing. The military and Big Pharma are somehow becoming pet projects of the left. Soon they’ll be advocating on behalf of Big Corn.

Metaverse

If you have a shit life, escape to the Metaverse.

Mary Harrington on the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel. That about sums it up. Bread and Circuses for the new millennium.

Narrative, meet Reality

[T]his week, the former executive editor, Len Downie, a near-icon of the old school, published a report on journalism and found a broad consensus among his colleagues that, in the words of one editor-in-chief, “Objectivity has got to go!” So every story now assumes “white supremacy” as the core truth of the world.

So what happens when stories arrive which, on the face of it, seem to refute that entirely? Take three recent events: two mass killings of Asian-Americans within two days in California by an Asian-American (in Monterey Park) and a Chinese national (in Half Moon Bay); five black police officers in a majority-black police force with a black police chief all but lynched and murdered an innocent black man; and a trans woman was convicted of the rape of two other women with the use of her penis.

How on earth do these fit into the pre-arranged “white supremacy” template?

Andrew Sullivan, ‌When The Media Narratives Meet Reality

I must travel in weird circles. I’ve never seen racist or homophobic or transphobic violence with my own eyes.

But considering how the media gaslight us on so much else (e.g., Russiagate, Hunter Biden’s laptop — I could go on, but these are the iconic gaslightings of recent years), why should I believe the press that white supremacy is everywhere when that defies my personal experience?

The US media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — of 46 nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And “moral clarity” journalists seem intent on driving it even lower.

(Andrew Sullivan again)

(I am aware of structural racism. Here’s a video for you if you aren’t. or think it isn’t real. If you want to call that “white supremacy,” you’ll need to come up with some stronger term for things like the KKK and the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us!” jackasses.)

You can’t make this stuff up

But what I find even more bizarre is this critique from the Buzzfeed piece:

Another huge problem: MrBeast’s video seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved. He doesn’t say in the video or in any of his subsequent public statements whether he consulted with the video’s subjects about how they felt to have their disability treated as a problem. That’s something that’s been argued over in the days since the video was uploaded.

Really? I suspect the fact that these blind people signed up to be cured of their blindness is a really strong indicator that they thought being blind was a problem. Talk about denying the humanity and agency of the disabled; you fools should have been proud of your blindness.

Call me retrograde and bigoted all you like, but I think that curing blindness is good. I don’t think it’s so good that we should drag blind people into hospitals and operate on them against their will. But, again, short of something like that … shut up.

Jonah Goldberg

All I can say for the Buzzfeed take is that Jesus did once ask a lame or blind person (I don’t recall which) “Do you want to be healed?”

Yes, you can!

We can’t help but notice you haven’t read our emails in a while.

National Review email to me in the early morning hours of February 5.

Yes you can help notice: don’t put trackers in them.

You’re welcome.

Politics

What is “National Conservatism”?

National conservatism is a baggy term—for some it means traditional conservatism with a particular concern for the American nation-state; for others it signifies collectivist social policies combined with social conservatism.

Barton Swaim

Tearing my hair out

The Covid emergency ends when the Supreme Court says it ends.

President Joe Biden.

I shouldn’t have to tell you how perversely wrong that it, but it certainly captures a bit of how Congress and the President reflexively defer to SCOTUS for any heavy lifting.

It’s particularly baffling in this case, though, since Amtrak Joe has announced that the Covid emergency will end in May — not that he’ll petition the Court for that.

Hold them all accountable

There is something deeply, cosmically unfair about a group of elites force-feeding voters a lie about a stolen election, bilking them out of their money, demanding with the most overheated rhetoric that they “fight” to save the country—and then avoiding all responsibility while those people are hauled off to jail for doing what they’d been asked to do.

Sarah Longwell, Hold them all accountable

Haul them off anyway. If we can’t stop demagogues, we can deter the rubes who believe them.

Whatever self-advancement requires

Writing in the National Review, Jack Butler lamented Daniels’ decision in a piece that included this passage: “I cannot begrudge a man his choices, particularly when made with his characteristic thoughtfulness. However, I can’t help but to think that, even if he himself won’t regret bowing out, the country will. While the Mitch Danielses of the world will seriously reflect on whether to enter politics and decide against it, the opportunists in public life will make no such considerations. They will instead do or say or think whatever is necessary for their own self-advancement. This paradoxical asymmetry will benefit some — indeed, it already has — but will continue to make us all worse off. The ranks of the shameless in our politics will grow while the reserves of the honest will diminish. That is not a promising trajectory if it continues unabated.” For the full piece, here it is: “Mitch Daniels Declines to Run for Senate. That’s Bad News for Our Politics.”

Based in Lafayette Substack

Turnabout ain’t fair play

That the American right would eventually tire of [progressive control of schools] and take steps to combat it through acting directly on the public schools themselves should not be surprising to anyone. And if this unhappy tale in American public life is to end with anything other than tragedy, it will require significant steps to deescalate, steps that must begin with an attempt to sincerely understand the opposite side’s concerns. The catechetical agendas of both right and left will need to expand themselves to accommodate questions of peaceful coexistence and principled pluralism amidst our deep differences. Should we fail to do this or if this turns out to be impossible, as it may well be, then reason offers little hope for any happy outcome to these current controversies.

Jake Meador, Education, Catechesis and the State.

Realism

In the 1960s, the liberal-progressive establishment successfully managed black anger, which became explosive in major cities, by accommodating demands for civil rights and allocating vast sums for economic uplift while preserving America’s existing hierarchies of wealth and power.

R.R. Reno. Reno’s title, Anger-Politics on the Right, suggests an updated application for this political placebo.

Bad Apples?

In 2022, no institution (aside from the presidency) reflected a greater partisan trust gap than the police. A full 67 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in the police, versus only 28 percent of Democrats.

David French, ‘Bad Apples’ or Systemic Issues?. I believe this was French’s debut as a full-time Opinion Writer for the New York Times.

Republicans under the gestalt-a-scope

The Republicans—where to start? They’re riven by policy disagreements, some of which stem from philosophical disagreements regarding what conservatism is and must be in the 21st century. Weirdly, since politics is a word business, their Washington leadership can’t find the words to talk about this. They don’t know how to talk about public policy. In the debt-ceiling debate, if that’s the right word, they’re allowing themselves to be tagged as the Axe the Entitlements party, or at least as people who’d secretly like to do it but can’t admit it, but when they’re in power they’ll try.

If they do that they will never win national power, or at least presidential power, again. Which they kind of know. But they do it anyway. Because they haven’t decided if they’re a “limited government” party or a party that accepts, as it should, that the federal government will never be small in our lifetimes, and being mature means seeing that and turning the party’s focus toward the pursuit of more conservative ends, such as . . . helping families? Police the government, don’t spend like nuts, aim for growth, encourage dynamism, think long term.

In any case they should stop saying “limited” government. People think the federal government is already limited, as in slow and stupid. They’d like it to be able and efficient. Maybe lean into a government that doesn’t push us around, demanding more than it’s due. Everybody wants that.

Peggy Noonan, Our Political Parties Are Struggling

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Saturday, 1/21/23

Culture

Journalism

If you think the decline in local newspapers is only an abstract story, or that Facebook posts can make up for local investigations, ladies and gentlemen, we give you New York’s Third Congressional District.

Peggy Noonan

(New York’s Third Congressional District is represented by a fellow who may be named George Santos.)

Enneagrams

I have heard or read many mentions of enneagrams, but only very recently did I look up the topic in the most authoritative source in the history of the cosmos.

It’s clear to me that my “characteristic role” is “reformer, perfectionist.” I also have a pretty good dose of “investigator, observer.” These tendencies correspond to particular besetting sins, of which I was well aware without the enneagram framework.

Beyond that, I’d feel as uncomfortable getting deeply into enneagrams as I would getting into QAnon. Maybe that’s unfair, but I’m not interested in wading into either enneagrams or QAnon to find out for myself.

David Crosby

If you care about such things, you’re probably aware that David Crosby died Wednesday night at age 81. It’s a gift to the rest of us that he lived so long despite the antics of his younger self.

I have a very soft spot for him, and I can identify three reasons without even breaking a sweat:

  1. The music. He was a great and creative folk-pop artist, and his music generally features great jazz-influenced harmonizations.
  2. The candor. Crosby appeared to be utterly candid about his self-inflicted injuries. Better that he’d not inflicted them in the first place, but afterward he certainly didn’t glamorize them.
  3. The sense of purpose. Marveling that he’d lived so long (see item 2), Crosby felt duty-bound to realize all the good music he had in him in his remaining days.

It’s my understanding that not all will be saved, but that I’m permitted to hope for the salvation of all. Requiescat in pacem; et lux perpetua dona eis domine. I’m not even going to spell-check that.

Why the Machine won’t win

I don’t think that the Machine will win … I don’t think it can. The drive to control is like the old lady who swallowed a fly. The solutions only exacerbate the problem. For the Machine, the problem is contingency: the sheer unpredictability of the world. To kill that fly, it swallowed the spider of hierarchy, the top-down view; but that was not enough. Centuries later, under mechanical influence, we cram down a T-Rex of lies just to convince ourselves that our social world makes sense. It doesn’t.

What do I mean by contingency? The living world is like a tree. Structures and shapes reappear at different scales. Look at a tree and it has pattern, form, wholeness. Look at a single leaf and, though only a tiny part of the tree, it too has pattern, form, wholeness. If your only interest in the tree is firewood, then the wholeness of the leaf doesn’t matter. If, though, you wish to understand a living tree, you get nowhere until you see the wholeness of the leaf. This is the source of contingency. What happens at leaf-level is almost infinitely variable, but reverberates up all the scales to the biggest. And this is the Machine’s great weakness. If its eyes were allowed to see the fractal subtlety of the leaf, then its mind could not devise a system for controlling the tree. It would be lost in contemplation. So it abstracts out the life. Leaves becomes Lego pieces and people become numbers. Rather than measure the world, the Machine always measures a proxy. This is how it will fail.

How do I know this? The Machine itself is an organism, although it does not know it, and organisms die.

…

It doesn’t matter whether you tear your empire to pieces in a frenzy of revolutions or allow it to slowly collapse under its own bureaucratic weight. Either way, it dies. It would be better to learn acceptance. The end of a civilisation is not the end of the world. It is not even the end of the human world. It is merely the end of the the culture of the cities: a passing phase that encloses even the most remote countryside now, but which is not all we have been or can be.

FFatalism, Against cyberpunk. For barbarism.

Law

Forensic lawyering

I don’t know that I’ve coined many phrases in my life, but I claim credit (after watching hired-gun “forensic witnesses”) for labeling the proverbial “world’s oldest profession” as “forensic dating.”

In that sense, our former President has long kept a stable of forensic lawyers — hired guns ready to file any damnfool nonsense to punish his critics.

But every lawyer is ethically obliged not knowingly to file lawsuits based on false facts or lacking any plausible legal theory in support. In other words, many of Trump’s lawsuits were unethical. But he and his lawyers never (or virtually never) got called on it. In my experience, a high proportion of lawsuits are unethical and should get sanctioned, but Trump is not alone; Judges tend be pretty lax on idiotic lawsuits from people who don’t pretend to be billionaires, too.

I was once a defendant in one of those idiotic lawsuits. The facts were roughly thus: Zoning ordinances forbade sexually-oriented businesses within X feet of residential neighborhoods (I think). Anyhow, someone set up a porn shop <X feet from whatever it was. I signed a petition asking My Fair City to enforce the zoning law.

So the city sued me, and everyone else who signed the petition, and the filthmonger, saying essentially “we don’t know what the ordinance requires us to do; let the people who annoy us fight it out with the filthmongers.”

I knew the odds were against sanctions, so I just fought my way out of the suit and then glared even more than usual at the corrupt City Attorney who filed it.

So nobody could be happier than I that a judge has finally called Trump’s lawyers on an unethical lawsuit, and imposed big-dollar sanctions ($900,000+) on his lawyer and on him personally for a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton (every silver lining must have a cloud) and others:

“This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in a 46-page ruling. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

…

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Judge Middlebrooks wrote. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions.”

…

Mr. Trump’s claims were “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion,” the judge wrote, adding, “This is a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts.”

Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, Judge Orders Trump and Lawyer to Pay Nearly $1 Million for Bogus Suit; see also Jonathan H. Adler, Trump Lawyers Sanctioned AGAIN for Frivolous Suit Against Political Opponents

Universal Principles

“NHL player Ivan Provorov shouldn’t have to wear a pride jersey for the same reason Colin Kaepernick shouldn’t have to stand for the anthem. … [T]he universal principle is free expression over compelled speech,” – Nicholas Grossman via Andrew Sullivan.

Complicating Grossman’s attractive categorical statement is that this is the NHL, not the government. But I like free speech culture, not just free speech law.

Politics

Manichean fanaticism, left and right

The right is not unique in conspiratorial delusion, of course. The refusal of many on the left to accept Tump’s legitimate victory in 2016 was real and widespread. Both Hillary Clinton and John Lewis declared Trump an illegitimate president. Remember the Diebold machines of 2004? Not far from the Dominion stuff today. And the intensity of the belief on the left in an unfalsifiable “white supremacist” America has a pseudo-religious fervor to it. The refusal of [Eric] Metaxas to allow any Republican to remain neutral or skeptical is mirrored by Ibram X. Kendi’s Manichean fanaticism on the far left.

But the long-established network of evangelical churches and pastors, and the unique power of an actual religion to overwhelm reason, gives the right an edge when it comes to total suspension of disbelief.

Andrew Sullivan, Christianism and Our Democracy

Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend

The far right thus fixates on whatever controversy is dominating politics at the time.

How America’s far right flits from issue to issue | The Economist

The Economist is generally sane and smart. But that block-quote amounts, doesn’t it, to “the far right engages whatever cause progressives have thrust onto center stage”?

Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.

Davos

“It was, and is, a corrupt circle-jerk,” – Jill Abramson on Davos via Andrew Sullivan.

Wordplay

Economist’s Words of the week:

  • Reichsbürger, a German far-right extremist group that rejects the legitimacy of the federal republic in favour of the German Reich of 1871. Read the full story here.
  • Friendshoring, a kind of reverse offshoring in which supply chains are redirected to stable, ideally allied countries. Read the full story.

Economists’ Words of the Year:

…

Aridification: the long-term drying of a region; a term applied when “drought,” or even “megadrought,” are no longer sufficient.

…

Productivity paranoia: an affliction of home workers afraid of being seen as shirkers, and bosses afraid that home-workers are indeed shirking.

TWaT city: one where many commuters travel to the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Battery belt: a green-friendly revitalised form of America’s “Rust Belt” through investment in industries such as electric-car manufacturing and “gigafactories” that make batteries for electric cars.

Vertiport: where multirotor drones that are large enough to carry people, also known as flying cars, take off and land.

At war with decadent dictionaries

I will never relent! “Literally” means literally, not “virtually” or “damn straight!” If we let them get away with changing that meaning, 55 years of my life are in vain!

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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