Category: journalistic murmurations

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Notebook Dump 6/13/24

Culture

Incentivizing misery (bad urbanism)

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated … to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Assignable Curiosity” — ouch!

As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

By what authority?

The newest [Covid conspiracy theory] I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

Zeynep Tufekci, A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (emphasis added)

And then there’s the National Security officials who prostituted themselves to declare Hunter Biden’s laptop a made-in-Russia hoax.

If I were on the Left, I hope I’d have the objectivity to reject most of what comes out of HRC and SPLC, both of them media-coddled bullshit factories, dependent on fear to stay in business. (By all rights, HRC should have declared victory and closed up shop after Obergefell; instead, it took up a version of transgender rights that many gays and lesbians reject.) But the Media lap up their stuff.

I don’t know who’s trustworthy any more. Whereas I formerly read stuff regularly from sources on the fairly far Left and Right, I now try to stick to sane-seeming, more-or-less-centrist sources, the fairly far Left and Right having become chronic liars. But I have no conclusive reason to think the center isn’t lying, too.

Any glimmers of absolute certainty I saw in the past were probably unwarranted, but these days it’s hard to find “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Elusive higher purposes

L.M. Sacacas attempts to disenthrall us from a subtle delusion:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

…

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one’s breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind’s wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn’t paint some days, didn’t even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

Teflon Sam

A liberal (maybe even left-wing) provocateur named Lauren Windsor attended a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society and, with hidden recording device and pretending to be a fervent Catholic conservative, tried to bait Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito into saying something inflammatory. She utterly struck out with Roberts but got an polite, anodyne response from Alito. The liberal media are now dishonestly engaged in trying to distill something sinister, even theocratic, from the weak tea of what he said.

But …

To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.

Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.

As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.

Marc O. DeGirolami. And:

Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Rod Dreher.

Errata

In March, I wrote:

IVF is in fact popular … (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

I stand at least semi-corrected:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels. (Source: politico.com)

Via John Ellis, whose daily new curation I recently discovered.

I note that the SBC resolution does not call for legislation, but I’m placing no bets on this being the end of the subject.

If you have no idea why anyone might opposed IVF, you need to get out more. As an oblique reminder, I again dig into my archives:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Beginning with the paragraph “The media’s manipulations …”, Ryan Anderson critiques IVF more directly.

Politics

Trading Power for Liberty

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

David French, MAGA Turns Against the Constitution

Western Hegemony has ended

Five hundred years of Western hegemony has ended, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.

NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war between the West and Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.

The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony as opposed to its revival. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganised as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, socialising inferiors is replaced by negotiations, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.

The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect of compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear wan increasingly likely.

Summary blurb for Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, recommended by cyberfriend and blogger Terry Cowan.

Although Diesen, even Cowan, pay closer attention to such things than I do, this is very much my view as well. So do I buy the book to confirm my priors or move on to another topic? If the Russia-Ukraine war ends before I buy it, I’ll probably move on.

But first, a key quote, from 1987 and from an eminent source, to keep and ponder:

George Kennan:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to go on, substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Via Diesen and Terry Cowan

Nothing has changed. It is literally true that we invent enemies to justify feeding what Dwight Eisenhower presciently called “the military-industrial complex.”

J.D. Vance (see below) also thinks the world is becoming multipolar.

J.D. Vance

Ross Douthat has an important interview: J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party. I’m sharing an unlocked version which, if you wonder, as I do, “What happened to the never-Trump author of Hillbilly Elegy?” is worth reading.

I’ll probably wrestle with it more if he becomes Trump’s running mate. For now, I’m slightly less cynical about his change(s) over eight years than I was before, and I find that I’m of one mind with him substantively on a few things.

Balancing Sociopathy against policy

I don’t apologize for the votes I cast after careful (indeed, searching) consideration. However, I do have to apologize for my view of the never Trumpers whom I found to be histrionic and unrealistic. They saw further that there were significant risks involved with Donald Trump that could very well outweigh the policy outcomes. They were right about that, and they deserve an apology from me (and perhaps others who saw it the way I did) for not perceiving that their concerns were grounded in reality, not merely some idealistic moral fragility. They perceived a legitimate threat, which did come to significant fruition.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers

This, published 9 days after the January 6 insurrection (or whatever you want to call it, except “patriot rally” or its cognates) remains worth reading — if only for his rationale for voting as he did. I consider his rationale incoherent; one need not vote for a menace who might do some good things in order avoid being a “free rider” if the menace actually does them. One can say “I think the menace outweighs the possible benefits.”

Reminder …

I’ve moved most political stuff to another blog, but if you’re curious, they’re just a click away.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

June!

Culture

Summertime wordplay

[I]n The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, James Lileks described the “glorious boredom” of a child’s summer with its “endlessly attenuated twilight, as the sun slides down like a hot coin and starts up the jukebox of crickets and frogs.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis)

(Via Frank Bruni)

The fate of the humanities

There’s no shortage of voices lamenting the state of the humanities, or at least of humanities departments. I was going to compile some samples, but if you’re interested, you’re already aware of them.

Are they wrong? Are the humanities actually at a new dawn?

The math nerds built our world, from the apps we use to get to work to the way we order our toilet paper. But with the rise of AI, are the coders set to become victims of their own success? Peter Thiel thinks so. In a recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, the PayPal co-founder predicted that the new technology would be “worse for the math people than for the word people.” What use is spending four years learning how to code when AI can do it all for you? 

The author Luke Burgis, echoing Thiel, predicts a “bull market in the humanities.” As he put it in a recent post on his Substack, “the humanities, rightly understood, are things that technology cannot take away or substitute for.” By the humanities, Burgis doesn’t mean the “ideological programs of cultural change” at elite universities. He means the humanities broadly understood as the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, and arts that explores “what it truly means to be human.” 

We may be in the middle of a technological revolution, but paradoxically, what’s timeless and ancient might be more valuable than what’s timely and modern.

The Free Press

From a somewhat different perspective:

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

…

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

Brad East

Sportsball

[M]uch of the modern sports world has lost its luster for me.

The era is long gone when the lineups of professional teams had enough year-to-year continuity that one knew all the players’ names and stats. But the rotation in and out of teams, including now in college sports, has become such a blur that only TV commentators afflicted with hyperfocus can keep track.

Sure, money-ball’s metrics rule, but the reality remains that now you’re mostly rooting for mercenaries. And as cable TV fades, pro and college sports teams are disappearing into the permanent fog called streaming. Looking for the airtime of your favorite team can turn into a constant and costly snipe hunt. Is it worth it?

Daniel Henninger

Tap-dancing around the “W” word

Whether and when someone with a uterus gets their period — for the first time, and throughout their life — can reflect not only their reproductive health, but their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, miscarriage, and premature death ….

STAT, H/T John Ellis

Let’s see now. Slightly more than half the human race comes equipped with a uterus. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a word for them less kludgy than “persons with uteruses” or the equivalent?

I wish they’d stop doing this

To journalists, this is a lazy visual for “this is a story about something-or-other related to Russia.”

To this American Orthodox Christian, it insinuates “Russian Orthodoxy is up to something sinister again.”

I object!

MAGA flag

Nobody knew the flag was MAGA until Justice Alito flew it. Justice Alito, however, should have known it was evil, so the argument goes, since by flying it he made it evil. Okay, well. Commenters, please add what else Justice Alito needs to endorse so that it can become shameful, and if you agree that he should start with the term fur baby. As for the other Alito flag controversy, the upside-down American flag, turns out The Washington Post saw that when it was briefly flying in 2021 and decided not to report on it since it wasn’t really a story, but now that the election’s coming up, everyone’s going through their diaries.

Nellie Bowles

Unplanned unparenthood

The obvious reasons for postponing or forgoing parenthood, such as lack of money or building a career, no doubt play a part. But another, more welcome, trend is also evident. Breaking the data down by age shows that fertility is in serious decline only among America’s youngest women. Since the 1990s the fertility rate for those aged between 15 and 19 has fallen by 77%; that for 20- to 24-year olds is down by 48%. Meanwhile, it is slowly increasing for women aged 30 and over (see charts). In 1990 teenage pregnancies accounted for one in eight births. By 2022 this had fallen to one in 25.

The Economist

Politics

Vice-signaling

“Vice-signaling.” Surely I’ve heard it before, but Michelle Goldberg brought it back as the overall branding of today’s GOP. (Killing Dogs. Taunting the Homeless. Praising Al Capone. This Is Trump’s Party.) To that list we can ad “voting for convicted felons if they’re really brazen about it.”

Speaking of which:

The blasphemy of the radical left is to deny human depravity; the radical right’s blasphemy is to enshrine this depravity as noble.

Matthew Beringer

Choosing

Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character,” the piece concluded. “Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this November’s election day.”

There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other one—usually because we find “our guy” a less than optimal choice but “the other guy” strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing “our side” will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.

The last eight years have made me more certain I was right.

Matthew J. Franck, Choosing Not to Choose

“Choosing Not to Choose” is the title of a new piece by Matthew Franck published today on the site. Trump is wholly unfit for office, Franck allows, but so is Biden for different reasons. And it’s important that Americans not vote for a political candidate they believe is unfit, as one’s vote inevitably influences one’s character. Invest in a corrupt political cause on lesser-of-two-evils grounds and eventually, by feeling obliged to defend it and perhaps embrace it, you too will be corrupted.

…

My dispute with Franck is simple. I disagree with how he’s framed the choice before voters.

The question isn’t “Biden or Trump?” so much as it’s “Should we continue with the constitutional order as we’ve known it or try something radically different?”

I’ll guarantee here and now that if Trump becomes president again and remains in good health he’ll try to extend his term in office past 2029. I won’t guarantee that he’ll succeed, but the attempt will be made as surely as you’re reading this. Trump is less a person than a personality type and his type is compelled to pursue its own interests remorselessly above all things. I think he’d honestly find it hard to comprehend why someone in his position shouldn’t try to extend their time in power.

Biden won’t do that if reelected. (And not just because he might be catatonic by 2029.) He won’t defy court orders. He won’t stock the leadership of the Justice Department with fanatics who have sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally. He won’t call the military out into the streets to confront people protesting him. And, contra Franck, I don’t believe he’ll claim a “mandate” if he wins, since he’s all but certain to do so with fewer electoral votes than he received in 2020 and with a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Nick Cattogio, Choosing to Choose

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Screed-free!

Comparative Free Speech Law

While every liberal democracy in the world claims to guarantee free expression in some form, the United States is essentially the only country where the government may not “take sides” on contentious issues by censoring expression based on the speaker’s viewpoint. As the post-October 7 examples show, many European countries have indeed taken a side in the public discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in a way that might surprise many American observers: calls for a ceasefire and an end to what they see as an Israel-perpetrated genocide are criminally prohibited hate speech, while support for continued attacks is constitutionally protected. This strange result illustrates the unintended consequences of allowing governments to pick and choose which beliefs are unlawful “hate speech” and which are fair criticism.

The notion—dominant the in most of the world—that hateful speech is not “free speech” dates at least to the global post-World War II reckoning with Nazism …

[H]ate speech is notoriously hard to define, and these systems often give wide latitude to officials to decide what these terms even mean and who should be prosecuted, discretion which officials often use in inconsistent and unpredictable ways.

…

How governments are responding to Israel-Gaza protests illustrates these radically diverging constitutional commitments to viewpoint neutrality. European national officials defended some of these pro-Palestinian restrictions primarily on public-order grounds more than stifling hate. But even so, the double standard implies that they view much of anti-Israeli speech as inherently anti-Semitic, and therefore, beyond the pale. This leads to a paradox, in which criticizing Muslims or Arabs as a group can constitute unlawful hate speech, but many expressions of support for Islamic-Arab groups are also prohibited, because of the threat that the government thinks those groups pose.

…

These examples offer a cautionary tale: When empowering the government to decide which beliefs are illegitimate, future policymakers may not use that power in ways you like or anticipate. They may even decide that your own viewpoints are the illegitimate ones—as with the song of South African anti-apartheid activists, “Shoot the Boer (i.e., white farmer)”; gender-critical feminists’ insistence that natal sex is critical to sexual orientation; and more recently, Palestinian advocates’ calls for a ceasefire and a “free Palestine.”

Scholars and activists celebrating new and stronger hate-speech laws might therefore consider Justice Hugo Black’s 1952 reaction to a (now largely discredited) decision upholding a conviction for disparaging Black Americans: “If there be minority groups who hail this [development] as their victory,” he wrote, they should contemplate Pyrrhus of Epirus’s observation: “Another such victory and I am undone.”

Kevin Cope, The Global Hate-Speech Conundrum via Eugene Volokh (bold added)

Too rich

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Out with the old, in with … ummmm …indifference

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built …

In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide …

There are desperately ill, utterly impoverished, terribly vulnerable people living on the street right now. They are exactly the kind of people the left should fight for. But because we have become such a caricature of ourselves, we are incapable of acknowledging that some people really are fucked up, that some people really are dangerous, that some people really aren’t just different but are sick, ugly sick, violent sick, no-silver-lining sick. Not beautiful and poetic madness but drug addicted, horrifically paranoid, caked-in-shit sick. And what people like that need is to be forced into treatment to save their lives. But sunny, false notions that everyone muttering to themselves on the subway hides a sweet little self-actualized busy bee inside of them, and an impossibly myopic fixation on the abstract rights of people whose brains have hijacked their minds, has left us unable to provide the actual help the severely mentally ill need. I have found no way to penetrate the liberal consciousness on this issue. Because it’s conservatives, I guess, who complain about violence and disorder on the streets.

Freddie deBoer, We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Car

Abortion politics

Even if I were still a single-issue (abortion) voter (I’m not; I’ve seen too many insane and/or phoney “pro-life” candidates), the GOP no longer make a compelling case on that issue.

Hamas Hyperbole, Media Credulity

In a May 6 report, the UN stated the death toll was 34,735, including 9,500 women and 14,500 children, or at least 24,000 civilians. 

But two days later, the UN quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died. The total number of deaths is about the same at 34,844, but that number includes 4,959 women and 7,797 children—a total of 12,756 civilians. (And this from the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel in 2023, compared to seven for the rest of the world combined.) 

This revision is the clearest sign yet that Hamas’s statistics cannot be trusted. As David Adesnik, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says: “The UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months.”

…

Spencer says that even the revised UN figures probably overstate the death toll, because the numbers aren’t limited to people who were killed in the war. “The UN numbers include every death in Palestine no matter what the cause was,” Spencer told The Free Press. “Every natural death, missing person, anyone killed by Hamas.”

And yet, so far not a single major media platform, save Fox News, has reported on the new UN numbers.

Oliver Wiseman, Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War

China bogeyman

On a Newsweek article skewering Viktor Orbán for his friendliness toward China:

China doesn’t give a damn what Hungary does with its borders, or with LGBT policy. That’s not to say that China doesn’t have and pursue its own interests. The Chinese are not altruists. It’s just that dealing with them, countries can preserve sovereignty in ways the West makes harder and harder to do.

Talk to African diplomats and lawmakers, and you’ll hear from them deep exasperation with the way Western countries constantly push feminist and LGBT ideology on them, as a condition of foreign aid. I invite you to spend just a little bit of time googling “LGBT”, “feminist” and “foreign policy”. Western institutions are as militantly evangelical about these ideologies as the Church was about religion in the Age of Discovery.

If your country wants and needs development aid, but wants to maintain cultural sovereignty, you’re going to look to China. To be very clear, Chinese support also has strings attached! But they are different strings. My point is simply that mindless cheerleaders for the Western establishment, like the Newsweek essayist, should make the effort to see what things look like to people outside the Greater American Empire.

Rod Dreher, ’4 Legs Good! 2 Legs Bad!’ Conservatism

Pre-emptive strike

Ron DeSantis bans cultivated meat in Florida because … reasons:

I’m not making this up. He Tweeted this graphic.

Strong People

Whenever I watch a Netflix show these days, it seems as if there are several themes that are yawningly predictable. One of them is the motif of the “strong woman.” (I’m not referring to the South Park “strong woman.” That is a subject for another day.) 

I mean the way in which female characters must now almost always be shown to be people of unbelievable strength—including rather unbelievable physical strength. One reason the recent Amazon adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (called The Rings of Power) flopped is that it tried to push this motif at every turn. In one especially implausible scene, a “strong woman” fights off a whole horde of armor-clad men with her bare fists. We were meant to marvel at her strength. Most people reached for the off switch.

Douglas Murray

I didn’t make it past the first 15 minutes or so of The Rings of Power, but it took me 6 episodes to reach my limit on Apple TV’s Sugar, which ended with a similarly absurd show of superhuman strength.

Zero-sum

Maybe the prospective [wedding service] customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Robert P. George Amicus Brief in 303 Creative, quoted by Francis J. Beckwith in Taking Rites Seriously.

Anti-Trump screeds moved to my personal Journal

There were two screeds here. They’re gone now. You’re welcome.

Here’s the gist of the first.

The second is from his own mouth via The Guardian and the Morning Dispatch.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Thursday, 4/11/24

Permanence

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”

Feckless Diktator

Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.

The Morning Dispatch

What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!

NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels

“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”

Kyle Neddenriep

I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”

Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.

Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?

I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-life chorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.

Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.

So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.

For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)

Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is in the Air (2021)

Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.

Gaining Perspective

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Can we afford the rich?

While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:

“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”

Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:

“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”

Dense Discovery, quoting Why the world cannot afford the rich

Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!

Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.

On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.

…

Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.

Trump Blows Up Anti-Terror Surveillance – WSJ

Modernists losing copyright protection

For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Back home in Indiana

The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:

BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.

Indiana Court Rejects Claim That Driver’s Licenses Must Include Third Gender Option

I appreciate living in a state that isn’t “way out there” to either extreme.

Wordplay

1

… umbraphilia — the love of eclipses …

Where You Can See the Next Total Solar Eclipse, in 2026 – The New York Times

2

You cannot make a competitive selection process a tool for equality, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.

Freddie deBoer

3

Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

4

Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

5

fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick], Una Sancta: Fundamentalism, Ecumenism and the One True Church

6

… the Netherlands, a country so flat it feels it’s been ironed into submission.

Chris Arnade

7

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

St. John Climacus Saturday

Culture

Elite or not?

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%” while making up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Michael Cuenco, Car dealers will decide America’s future.

Cuenco seems to overlook the difference between wealth and prestige.

Sportsball

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

Eugene McCarthy, via the Economist’s World in Brief

Dictator or not?

On the drive into Budapest from the airport, travelers can see billboards erected by the Hungarian political opposition, featuring a photo of Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the slogan “God? Homeland? Pedophilia!” It’s a reference to the recent scandal involving a presidential pardon of a politically connected man who had been convicted of aiding in a pedophilia cover-up. The scandal cost the ruling Fidesz party its top two female politicians: President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga.

Associating the prime minister, who apparently did not know about the pardon until the media reported it, and who quickly called for resignations of these top allies, is a low blow. But that’s how it goes in Hungary. Fidesz is not above similar tactics. If you expect Magyar politics to be a tea party, you are going to be disappointed.

Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now? 

… Hungary, which supposedly groans under the burden of the Orban dictatorship, enjoys far more freedom of expression than countries whose media and whose leaders condemn it as repressive. You have to wonder why.

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative (no paywall).

Eugenics for the age of The Machine

Servility

Will we reach the point where nobody thinks they could start their own little business?

Political

Meet the new boss, Trumpier than the old boss

Washington Post: Was the 2020 Election Stolen? Job Interviews at RNC Take an Unusual Turn.

Those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee after a Donald Trump-backed purge of the committee this month have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews, making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.

The Morning Dispatch

Trump’s faith

The closest I get to liking Donald Trump is when he evinces contempt for those who idolize him.

I feel guilty about that, as one shouldn’t sympathize with con artists. But you know how it is with scams: At a certain point of extreme gullibility, the mark starts to seem more contemptible than the person preying on them. If you’re still falling for “Nigerian prince” emails in 2024, the problem lies chiefly with you, not with the flimflam man responsible.

The sheer laziness with which Trump has courted evangelical voters since 2015 has always betrayed a degree of sincere disdain for them that’s unusual in a man not otherwise known for honesty. It would have been trivially easy for him to brush up on Christian dogma after he entered politics in the name of convincing the Republican base that he’d seen the light after a dissolute adulthood. But … he couldn’t be bothered to do so.

He’s never cared enough about the faith espoused by most of his supporters to even pretend to take it seriously.

That’s how we ended up with him once famously rendering “2 Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians.” And listing “an eye for an eye” as his favorite Bible verse instead of something from the Gospels. And admitting at an evangelical forum that he couldn’t recall ever having asked for God’s forgiveness.

A man who lies like he breathes somehow can’t get motivated to lie persuasively about being pious, even as a gesture of minimal respect for his own fans. That’s remarkable. And insofar as most evangelicals have shrugged it off and rolled over for him anyway, my sympathies lie more with him. He’s been sending them the political equivalent of “Nigerian prince” emails for nine years; if they haven’t wised up yet, that’s a problem with them more so than with Trump.

…

His first political priority, even above maximizing his chances of reelection, is purging the Republican Party of anyone who would question his right to rule. He doesn’t want independent-minded Christians in the GOP any more than he wants the traditional conservatives who preferred Nikki Haley in the primary. He’ll win without them—and if he can’t, he’ll at least have consolidated his power over one-half of America’s political establishment in the process.

In that context, whether by design or by happenstance, the “Trump Bible” operates as a sort of litmus test for evangelicals who have stuck with him this far through thick and thin. You won’t abandon me if I make a mockery of your faith, will you? No, of course you won’t.

…

The devolution of evangelicalism in the Trump era is itself an interesting mix of radicalism and transactionalism, mirroring Trump’s personality. Many Christians made a cynical bargain with him in 2016, suppressing their moral discomfort and offering him their votes in exchange for guarantees that he’d enact their agenda, starting with limits on abortion. Insofar as his poor character and irreligiosity troubled them, some may have idly hoped that their influence over him, and the influence of figures like Mike Pence, would turn his heart toward God in time. He might be remade in Christianity’s image.

That transaction didn’t pan out the way they’d hoped. For many, Christianity has been remade in his image.

Nick Catoggio, The True Faith

How to reach Republicans with the anti-Trump Gospel

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.

He thinks Donald Trump’s voters see him as akin to King Cyrus or King David in the Bible, a flawed messenger, so it’s best to use a biblical narrative about betrayal.

“If you say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy, rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’”

James Carville profile by Maureen Dowd

What’s behind “Lawfare”?

I submit that what changed when Trump entered the political arena on the highest levels isn’t that he gained powerful enemies who resolved to take him down by any means possible, nefarious or otherwise. What changed is that he was now a magnet for all kinds of scrutiny—journalistic as well legal …

Isn’t this the most obvious thing in the world? What is the first thing that anyone entertaining a run for the White House is asked by anyone who understands the process? Do you have any skeletons in the closet? Better get them out in the open now, because they will be discovered during the course of the campaign, and they will sink you, especially if you seek to cover it up.

Because Trump’s alleged crimes and misdeeds were extremely complex and deeply embedded in his sprawling business empire—and because the wheels of justice (rightly) grind extremely slowly—it’s taken many years for numerous lines of investigation to culminate in several trials all at roughly the same time, just as Trump is gearing up for a third attempt to win the White House. That’s not great. But as Jonathan Chait has argued quite cogently, the reason why it’s happening is that Donald Trump is a crook! If he wanted to continue getting away with being a crook, he could have decided not to run for president! Instead, he launched a campaign, won, lost, and is now running again. That’s nearly nine years (and counting) of ensuring the Klieg lights of public scrutiny are trained on every aspect of his life and business. What did he expect?

Since Trump trends toward imbecility, he may be surprised and outraged about this. But his defenders really should know better.

Damon Linker, Seven More Months of … This?

Ronna McDaniels’ excellent NBC adventure

Jonah Goldberg on NBC’s difficulty finding commentators to defend Trumpy positions:

I’ve said it a million times on here: When we were all growing up, […] the word “RINO” meant someone who was squishy on abortion, or taxes, or foreign policy, or something like that. It was about issues. Now, by Trump’s own admission, RINO only refers to people insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. And so you get this weird kind of thing where you have to find people who are supposedly intelligent conservatives who are also willing to talk about Donald Trump as if he’s comrade Stalin. And that’s a really tiny universe of people because it almost demands that you have no integrity or that you lie. And that’s how Ronna McDaniel starts to look attractive.

Wordplay

Tina Brown assessed King Charles: “Even with the best prognosis for his cancer, he has been left with a rueful rump of a reign.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)

Jesse Green reviewed a new Broadway production: “Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony. At ‘The Notebook,’ I was the person next to you.” (Christopher Flores, San Antonio)

And Bret Stephens, conversing with Gail Collins, skewered the social media site affiliated with Donald Trump: “I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.” (Ross Payne, Windermere, Fla.)

Clipped from Frank Bruni

Theodore Saturday 2024

NOT POLITICS (at least not American)

Defining Deviancy Down (and up)

In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

… [T]he application of progressive moral double-standards is now seen at the level of geopolitics, most specifically over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. We have produced a discourse in which deviancy is defined up for Jews and Israel, and down for Arabs and Muslims.

…

[E]very lowering of standards to appease extremist Arabs and Muslims is racism dressed up as compassion and disdain masquerading as kindness. It is moral confusion and it is dangerous — suicidally so.

Ayan Hirsi Ali

Motivated blindness

The problem for the Times is that many of its own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza.

“There are a huge number of people at the Times who are activists, and it is their job to tell a particular story,” one Times reporter told The Free Press. “The precedent was set that this works. If it doesn’t work through one means, they will find another.”

Oliver Wiseman

BORDERLINE

Demoralizing the troops

No Victorian-era missionary could ever match the moralistic certainty displayed by left-wing Americans and Europeans, when it comes to instructing the savage Other about its failings. At least the missionaries understand that they have to behave with a modicum of intercultural respect to the natives …

Three years ago, the American ambassador to Niger raised the Pride flag at the embassy, in the heart of the conservative Islamic nation, and issued a public statement affirming the U.S. government’s dedication to LGBT rights. Why? How did that advance American interests in this strategically critical central African nation?

…

On Monday, Gallup released a poll showing that fewer Americans these days consider China and Russia to be their nation’s enemies. What’s more:

Additionally, 5 percent of Americans now say the U.S. was its own worst enemy, which is up 4 points from last year. Pollsters noted this is the highest percentage of Americans who said the U.S. is its own worst enemy since 2005. Eleven percent of independents said the U.S. was its top enemy, according to the new poll.

They have a point. Long gone are the days when America was the uncontested global hyperpower. Washington has squandered its material power on wars that made the world more dangerous, and also exposed the U.S. to accusations of hypocrisy. To many outside the U.S., American claims to defend democracy and advance human rights are little more than moralization justifying American cultural, economic, and military hegemony.

…

A retired U.S. military source close to the data confirmed recently what I had only been told anecdotally by armed forces veterans: that military families, long a main source of recruits for the all-volunteer army, have been so alienated by the Pentagon’s woke contempt for traditional American values that they have discouraged their sons and daughters from serving.

…

You can’t wage culture war on conservatives at home and in foreign lands, and expect those same people to show up for you when the shooting starts.

Rod Dreher, When Culture War Affects Real War

From Frum’s Mouth to God’s Ear

[W]hen it came time to make his final appeal to voters, candidate [Ronald] Reagan deflected attention away from himself. Instead, he targeted the spotlight directly at the incumbent president and the president’s record.

When Reagan spoke of himself, it was to present himself as a plausible replacement … Reagan understood that Reagan was not the issue in 1980. Jimmy Carter was the issue. Reagan’s job was to not scare anybody away.

…

But Trump won’t accept the classic approach to running a challenger’s campaign. He should want to make 2024 a simple referendum on the incumbent. But psychically, he needs to make the election a referendum on himself.

That need is self-sabotaging.

In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.

Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.

…

In Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, the private eye Philip Marlowe breaks off a friendship with a searing farewell: “You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.” When historians write their epitaphs for Trump’s 2024 campaign, that could well be their verdict.

David Frum

Sin quickly, repent next January

People love people who have good stories and there is no good story without trouble so get into trouble while you’re still young and have time to climb out of the ditch. Don’t do things that can really hurt you like drugs you buy from strangers on the street, just fall in with lowlifes, fall for an obvious scam, say crazy things you know aren’t true, and the simplest way to accomplish that is to endorse the Florida Orange. Now.

Starting in January 2025, there’s going to be a market for Republican confessionals — a yuge market — the lecture circuit will have room for upright people admitting that they were hornswoggled by the most obvious conman to come down the pike since the guy who sold the mimeograph that prints fifties. Even Scientologists can see through him.

Garrison Keillor

Three from Nellie

Google tendentiously rewrites the dictionary

Last note on this: as America’s reporters were pretending they’d never used the term bloodbath to indicate a financial situation, Google’s activist engineers were working to back them up. Search “bloodbath definition” and the search giant once included the informal usage: Informal. A period of disastrous loss or reversal: A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market. But by Thursday, Google dropped that, and the only definition offered: an event or situation in which many people are killed in a violent manner. Weird!

Nellie Bowles

How liberals changed their minds on guns

Also, interestingly, in America, illegal migrants (undocumented, under-papered, citizen-questioning, whatever you want) can now legally own guns thanks to Obama-appointed Illinois federal judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who just ruled as such. The extent to which gun control has fallen out of fashion cannot be overstated. As soon as people realized that gun control would have to be enforced by cops and not special gun fairies, everyone turned to policies that would make the old NRA blush.

Nellie Bowles

Jaw-dropper

[T]he ADL filed a federal complaint about Berkeley schools after allegations of, among other things, elementary school students being told by their teachers to write “stop bombing babies” on note cards and then to attach those cards to the door of the only Jewish teacher at the school.

Nellie Bowles

Whatchamacallit surgery

Someone wrote to Andrew Sullivan objecting to his use of “changing sex” as a description of what some people so notoriously are having done to their bodies. Sullivan replied that “Sex reassignment is the most accurate term. No man will ever function as a woman and vice-versa.”

Sullivan’s solution is tempting in a go-along-to-get-along sort of way, but it tacitly concedes the “sex assigned at birth” Orwellianism.

I don’t like it. You may slip it by me, but I don’t believe it’s accurate.

What to call it, then? Since “gender” appears to be subjective (if not meaningless), “gender confirmation” seems the least bad option I know.

Surgery may be the least bad option in a few cases of an adult’s intractable gender dysphoria, but don’t ever ask me to affirm that there actually exists such a thing as a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s body — or that surgery can actually change sex.

YEAH, PROBABLY POLITICS

Will this, finally, make him a kamikaze candidate?

Trump has added a much more disturbing project to his list of campaign promises: He intends to pardon all the people jailed for the attack on the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

Trump once held a maybe-sorta position on pardoning the insurrectionists. He is now, however, issuing full-throated vows to get them out of prison. On March 11, Trump declared on his Truth Social account: “My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”

…

Trump is no longer flirting with this idea. The man whose constitutional duty as president would be to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is now promising to let hundreds of rioters and insurrectionists out of prison with full pardons. And eventually, he will make clear what he expects in return.

Tom Nichols

On “Bloodbaths”

Donald Trump predicted a bloodbath if Joe Biden is re-elected. Conveniently lost in that description is that the “bloodbath” was a flooding of America’s auto market with Chinese cars, which he pledged to keep out with a 100% tariff.

But his defenders weren’t entirely up front, either:

What Trump defenders elide is that the former president has forfeited any presumption of good intentions. Trump winks at and even celebrates violence all the time. He fawns over authoritarians and insists that presidents, like rogue cops, should have complete immunity to commit crimes. When the Capitol was under siege by a mob acting on his behalf, he declined to intervene for hours. He even defended the mob’s chants of “Hang Mike Pence!”

Heck, Trump once again celebrated those “great patriots” of January 6 during the same rally Saturday, declaring those convicted of assault and other crimes “hostages.” If these convicted criminals are hostages, where are the ransom demands?

In short, Trump, who routinely distorts others’ statements and plays footsie with violence, doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when he uses terms like “bloodbath.”

Jonah Goldberg, Stop Making a Martyr of Donald Trump

High Crimes or Misdemeanors

It’s an unusual leader who’s capable of committing high crimes or misdemeanors in two distinct genres of corruption. But Donald Trump is an unusual man.

His first impeachment was a case of extortion. Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but instead of sending the funds overseas expeditiously, Trump withheld them while leaning on President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor” in the form of dirt on his likely opponent in the next presidential election.

His second impeachment was a case of fanaticism. Trump couldn’t cope with losing the election so he began howling that he had been a victim of fraud. He spun up his supporters about it so relentlessly that they ended up breaking into the Capitol on January 6 to try to halt the transfer of power.

His first high crime was a product of transactional logic, ice cold in nature. His second was a product of passionate radicalism, red hot by comparison. There may have been more corrupt public figures than him in America’s distant past but no one matches him for versatility.

Nick Catoggio, The Transactional Radical

The story of the conservative movement since 2016

Finding dignity in politics is like finding jewelry in a sewer system. There’s some there, rest assured; all you need to do is search.

But, good lord, the foulness you’ll endure while looking for it is unspeakable.

I’ve gotten used to it to a degree, as any sewer worker does. But on Friday I nearly choked on the fumes of cynical grifting putridity:

Ben Shapiro, who once called Trump a “spoiled brat” and refused to vote for him in 2016, is now co-hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump:

“I’d walk over broken glass to vote for him [Trump].”

This is what selling your soul for power and money looks like. pic.twitter.com/If5gh4duM3

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 15, 2024

Anyone who once vowed never to vote for Donald Trump and now finds himself willing to walk over broken glass for him after a coup attempt and assorted impeachments and indictments has either cashed in his soul or been brain-poisoned by his own populist propaganda.

That’s the story of the conservative movement since 2016, by and large. Unspeakable.

Nick Catoggio again.

Putin is in control

Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata.

Seymour Hersh

Not even a nod of acknowledgement

Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM.  They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.

…

Were we supposed to wait patiently until the New York Times and The Atlantic lazily gathered the gumption to do their jobs? Or were we to speak up and stoically accept our due stigma? And now, after the foreseeable catastrophes have been laid bare, must conservatives pretend that no one could have seen it coming? Or worse, play cheerleader to liberals for finally—finally—waking up to a disaster that should have been easy for them to prevent?

…

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.

Abigail Shrier

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Wednesday, 3/20/24

I grew up on “March 21 is the start of Spring,” but we’re not there yet and it nevertheless has been Spring for going on a day.

A trained physicist of my social media acquaintance explains:

Sunrise and sunset are defined as the time when the sun’s upper edge crosses the horizon; if you timed them from the crossing of the sun’s center, day and night should be equal today. Astronomical calculations equinoxes go by the center. Also, in practical terms, the atmosphere refracts light, so you can see the sun when it’s actually a little bit below the horizon. I believe most posted sunrise/sunset times take refraction into account? though refraction angle varies with air pressure. Anyhow, enjoy your extra 6 or 7 minutes!

So now you know until we both forget again.

Political

Too political

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

Josh Barro in the Atlantic

I generally like Josh Barro, and this misguided piece won’t make me hate him. But it’s fraught with problems, starting with how it encourages a starkly partisan politicization of the Supreme Court — a politicization that Barro regularly exhibits on his Serious Trouble podcast with his snotty and unjustified treatment of Trump appointees as servile to Trump.

The “Trump Court” isn’t all that Trumpy? They’re conservatives, but not partisan Republican hacks. For that matter, the three “liberals” are not partisan Democrat hacks, witness the 14th Amendment Section 3 decision of a few weeks ago. A Biden “reliably liberal” Justice will disappoint the Democrats periodically because the Justices are, first of all, Judges, with a weighty sense of their importance at the top of that co-equal branch. Republicans learned that for decades under Eisenhower’s appointments.

But you wouldn’t know that from press coverage. The press feeds an unrealistic narrative of slavish partisanship on the bench, especially about Republican nominees. A Sotomayor resignation in the next few months, after public calls like Barro’s, will justify this heretofore largely unjustified narrative. (Maybe that’s why actual politicians, who Barro calls “gutless,” are importuning Sotomayor privately, not loudly and openly.)

And, of course, it invites tit-for-tat response. If Donald Trump wins the election, there would be calls for Clarence Thomas to retire. Never mind that Donald Trump will not be working off a Federalist Society-type* list because his first-term nominees have not been servile, as he expects everyone to be. I suspect that Thomas would resist such calls, but since he seems to enjoy real life, he might succumb.

I used to say “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right.” I think I’ve been largely vindicated in that, but it’s hard to prove my vindication because Irreligious Right barbarians these days often adopt an “evangelical” label, so their lack of Christian bona fides is harder to demonstrate than I care to undertake. (If you deny that someone who calls himself “Christian” really is Christian, you’re being mean in today’s muddled minds.)

But I’d now add, fully aware that it fuels calls like Barro’s, “If you don’t like FedSoc-type* justices, just wait ‘till you see who Trump nominates if he gets a second term.”

(* Re: “FedSoc-type”: The 2016-2020 list, which Trump campaigned on, was from John Leo, a FedSoc Founder, but not from FedSoc itself, as it doesn’t do that sort of thing institutionally.)

The hidden costs

I wrote here recently to the effect that the dollar amounts of our military aid the Ukraine should be deeply discounted, since Ukraine turns around and buys from us (insofar as the aid is not “in kind” weaponry). I fear I was too superficial, and the all-in cost is potentially greater than the nominal amount:

When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.

Malcom Kyeyune, The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine

I guess focusing on dollars misses the full picture, huh?

GOP’s conscientious objectors to Trump

A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence refusing to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure”) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, William Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, John Coats, John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional Cabinet members, present and former GOP members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps to guarantee his loss in November.

…

But it’s also possible that the refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party Trump and Bannon originally hoped to build eight years ago—a “workers party” that’s actually (or more precisely described as) a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.

… The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer especially popular with less-educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old-guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.

Damon Linker

I have a blog category for “Zombie Reaganism.” If you think about it for a moment, you’ll be unsurprised that it has fallen into disuse.

TikTok

I have zero firsthand experience with TikTok, but you may have noticed that it’s in the news.

[I]n one of the more astonishing public relations blunders in modern memory, TikTok made its critics’ case for them when it urged users to contact Congress to save the app. The resulting flood of angry calls demonstrated exactly how TikTok can trigger a public response and gave the lie to the idea that the app did not have clear (and essentially instantaneous) political influence.

…

Trump’s flip-flop demonstrates once again the futility of ascribing any kind of coherent ideology to the former president. Before Trump’s change of heart, one could argue that being “tough on China” was one of the fixed stars of his MAGA policy constellation …

Second, the flip-flop indicates that Trump’s positions may well be for sale, even when they threaten national security …

Finally, Trump’s reversal reveals that his real enemy is always the domestic enemy. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote last Thursday: “Populist-nationalism is about asserting tribal preeminence over other domestic tribes. And so it prioritizes fighting the enemy within.” In this context, the “enemy within” is Mark Zuckerberg and the “deep state.”

…

Catoggio correctly observed, “It speaks volumes” that “Trump felt safe politically allying himself with China on a pressing issue in an election year so long as he framed his position in terms of greater antipathy to one of the right’s domestic enemies, Big Tech.”

…

Last week, I wrote a column urging Reagan conservatives and Haley Republicans to vote for Joe Biden. The withering reaction from some on the right demonstrated the extent to which many Republicans still possess the mistaken belief that Trump possesses conservative convictions. How many times does he have to demonstrate that his personal grievances and perceived self-interest will always override ideology or policy?

David French

As I’ve written before, I think I’ll again be spared the indignity of having to vote for either of the major-party candidates, but French has made a fairly good case for Republicans and conservatives holding their noses and crossing over this year.

Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right – Front Porch Republic

I doubt that the GOP could have more completely rejected this advice than it has since, say, 2005.

The biggest threat to traditional values

Last night I was having drinks with a Catholic friend visiting the city from western Europe. He is pretty demoralized about politics and everything else. He told me how pathetic the institutional church is in his country, as well as the political parties his side usually votes for. He complained that it is so difficult to rouse the conservatives in his country to recognize how insane the situation is. They want desperately to pretend that everything’s fine, that if they just keep voting for the mainstream conservative party, it’s all going to work out in the end.

He told me that one of the most difficult things for him to come to terms with is how his view on America has changed. He said he has no love for Russia or China, but it was a bitter red pill for him to swallow to realize that as bad as those countries’ governments are, they aren’t the biggest threat to him. No, he said, the forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

Rod Dreher, Revolution & The Call To Bravery

I initially found the second paragraph more arresting; now I’m not so sure that the first isn’t just as salient.

(Note: I’m unsubscribed from Rod Dreher’s Substack in the sense that I no longer pay. I believe I wrote about why I unsubscribed at the time of the decision. But he still has many public posts that get mailed to me.)

Cultural

Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber Hothouse

In August 2017, James Damore, then a twentysomething Google software engineer, sent a memo to all employees called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Damore argued that the company’s political bias toward the left “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” Damore suggested, among other things, that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” was “misguided and biased.” Within a month, Google fired him for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.” 

Google has long been a progressive company—in 2020, for example, 88 percent of donations by Google employees went to Democrats (almost $5.5 million) while only 12 percent (some $766,000) went to Republicans. But after Damore was ousted, Google’s corporate culture became even more radical, according to Maguire. “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more open ideological agenda,” he said.

Francesca Block, Olivia Reingold, Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

Ban the “book banning” grift!

The ALA releases its annual report every April (which is common enough) in which it releases figures on how many challenges to library holdings were made the preceding year. But it runs its “Banned Books Week” every October, which gives it two instances every year to issue a press release lamenting the grave danger to democracy that these challenges pose. Almost every major media outlet—and I do mean almost every single one—follows suit, wondering how long American democracy will last if elementary students can’t continue to check out Gender Queer.  

What’s the problem with the ALA’s report on “challenges”? As I argued here last year, the numbers are misleading …

This year, the ALA is highlighting the total number of books challenged whereas last year they were highlighting the total number of unique challenges. Why? Because the number of single challenges has actually gone down from 1269 in 2022 to 1247 in 2023. (The ALA notes that several challenges contained as many as a hundred books.) That doesn’t help advance the narrative that right-wing parents are a serious threat to democracy, so the ALA is touting the 4,240 figure.

At root, my problem with the ALA is the lack of transparency. They leave out important contextual information in order to raise money by fear-mongering (there is always a link to give to the ALA’s supposed defense of free speech with every press release). How many libraries reported challenges? How many books were actually removed from shelves? Were these at city libraries or school libraries (the ALA doesn’t distinguish between the two)?

Micah Mattix

Andrea Long Chu’s says the quiet part out loud

Spending even one minute responding to Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation feels like a defeat. It is such an ill-conceived, careless piece of writing, and one that exhibits so little genuine concern for the group it is supposedly written on behalf of — trans kids — that its own thesis statement is basically self-debunking: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” argues Chu. 

Alas, this argument wasn’t printed on some random blog, but as a cover story in New York magazine, where I worked as an online editor and writer-at-large from 2014 to 2017. Chu is given almost 8,000 words to defend her radical argument, but she just. . . doesn’t. I don’t quite understand why this article was printed, in this form, in the pages of a great magazine staffed by some of the best editors in the country. The counterarguments to her position are so blazingly obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a child or a teenager that it’s an act of willful editorial neglect to simply ignore them entirely. The whole thing comes across much more as an act of high-profile trolling than a meaningful contribution to the discourse about trans kids. Along the way, as is Chu’s habit, she smears the work of a bunch of journalists, myself included, by cherry-picking quotes, sleazily writing that things we have written could be seen as arguing X, where X is something offensive we never would endorse, and so on. 

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer for her literary criticism. Maybe she’s brilliant at it. But her attempts at actual real-world policy arguments are remarkably lazy. Her editors let her down here.

Jesse Singal.

I’m nearing the end of a one-month paid subscription to New York. Even apart from Chu’s piece (which I skipped when I saw how insane his/her thesis was), I’ve been too unimpressed to continue.

Impervious to the Evidence

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

March 9, 2024

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

One thing always catches my eye in the Morning Dispatch: Items captioned “Presented without Comment.”

So here’s a few of my own:

Okay, I can’t resist a little comment. The three are grousing about the Colorado ballot exclusion case, Trump v. Anderson.

George Conway, author of the third listed column, sums up what I think happened:

It may be noble-minded for someone like me, sitting in the cheap seats, to incant my favorite Latin legal maxim, Fiat justitia ruat caelum—“Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.” But I don’t hold a lifetime appointment to decide how justice is to be done. And however much I’d like to think that judges really believe … that they “cannot allow [their] decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to [their] work,” the fact is that judges are human. Their decisions are affected at times by their perception of what the public reaction may be.

…

I could go on picking apart the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Court’s opinion, and legions of law professors will do so for ages to come, but the Court’s lack of convincing reasoning is, frankly, beside the point. The Court’s decision wasn’t about law. It was about fear.

I think SCOTUS reached the right conclusion on the wrong rationale. You can make fun of me, but I think the theory is correct that the President is not an “officer” subject to section 3. I think that for having read some of the history around section 3, which I find more persuasive than one Senator’s (disingenuous?) assurance to another that the amendment indeed “hid an elephant (POTUS) in a mousehole” (“other officers”). And I return to that ideé fixe after feeling, as I recall, some passing doubt about it during the oral argument.

Well, at least SCOTUS was “unanimous.” Now I can only hope that never-Trump Republicans, who Trump has disinvited from his party, will oblige him in sufficient numbers to assure his defeat, fair and square, in the November balloting.

Political

On not feeding the Christian Nationalist beast

After a longform survey of the Christian Nationalist landscape, Jake Meador delivers the potent point:

What worries me now, though, is not the Christian Nationalists themselves. Frankly, many of them are too reckless, undisciplined, and reactive to be able to accomplish the revolutionary change they seek. What worries me is that there are a great many socially conservative evangelical voters who love the democratic life who are constantly being called “Christian Nationalists” by the likes of Heidi Przybyla for believing things that are utterly unremarkable in Christian history. If our secular media outlets continue to tell them that “Christian Nationalism” is the belief in things virtually all Christians across history have believed, I fear they will listen. And they will find these ethno-nationalist totalitarian aspirants and, not realizing what they are doing, they will make common cause with them.

After all, they’ve already been told that they are ‘Christian Nationalists,’ haven’t they? They’ve been told that protecting the unborn makes them a Christian nationalist, that wishing to promote natural marriage makes them a Christian nationalist, that wanting men to support their children makes them a Christian nationalist. They’ve even been told that believing our rights come from God makes one a Christian nationalist.

Eventually they will start to believe it.

Here is my request: If you are a secular person who wants Christian Nationalism to lose, you should stop helping the Christian Nationalists win.

(One hyperlink added)

It was quite adolescent of me, with my actual adolescence a mitigating factor, but there were several times in my younger life when I was falsely accused of things and reacted by actually doing them.

So I hope you can forgive me for agreeing heartily with Jake Meador on this one.

White Rural Rage

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
Random House, 320 pages, $32

Why does a book like this exist? For one thing, it exists to serve the demand for books among people who lack the patience for reading literature. These books are some of the many consumer items that serve as tokens of college education. By visiting the front-most display table at Barnes & Noble and picking up a copy of The Sixth Extinction or Freakonomics, one affirms one’s place among the civilized few who “read.” With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller toss another forkful of silage into the troughs of the book-club class. 

Of course, a book like this is also intended to provoke a reaction from its targets. The authors are counting on it, as they make clear when they predict that some will conclude that “as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” The anticipated backlash is an essential part of the marketing strategy.

…

It is the third part of their thesis on which I would like to raise some points of information. Waldman and Schaller assert that, despite their ruling stature, rural whites “paradoxically” fail to demand anything of their political leaders. The authors admit that rural whites have some legitimate sources of anger, particularly the economic hollowing out of their regions by “late-stage capitalism.” However, having despaired of correcting this, rural whites lend their electoral clout to Republicans, who offer a program of cultural vengeance without any redress of rural whites’ material grievances. There is a lot of truth to this. I would just add that pretty much all Americans have seen their communities hollowed out by capitalism, and pretty much all of them have despaired of receiving very much from their representatives. Those who plan to trudge submissively to the polls for President Biden in November are hardly more demanding subjects than those who will cast a vote for Donald Trump.

…

Consider this remark from the authors, in reference to a 2023 conference in Nebraska about preventing agricultural monopolies: “Rural folks are gradually realizing that corporate consolidation, not socialism, is destroying their economies.” Judging by the record of the Grangers, the People’s Party, William Jennings Bryan (who is briefly cited in the book as a typical rural bigot) the Non-Partisan League, the American Society of Equity, Robert LaFollette, the National Farmers’ Organization, Estes Kefauver, the American Agriculture Movement, the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, and others, I would suggest that rural people made some hesitant advances toward this insight before 2023. Indeed, a poll conducted by Open Markets Institute in 2018 showed that 54 percent of Trump voters favored the government breaking up monopolies, and only 28 percent were opposed. Moreover, some of the most visible MAGA firebrands are thoroughgoing antimonopolists. Perhaps some of the “gradual realization” Waldman and Schaller delight in when it is expressed in small activist conferences is also reflected in the far more formidable MAGA movement.

Hamilton Craig, The Truth About ‘White Rural Rage’

Sully’s take on SOTU

Not everyone was totally bowled over by Joe Biden’s Thursday SOTU. Andrew Sullivan had the most colorful, detailed neutral take I’ve seen:

Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.

He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.

And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.

Ouch!

Conservatives and Republicans

[T]he overlap in a Venn diagram of conservatism and capital-R Republicanism has never been smaller.

The Dispatch, in its fourth-ever editorial: * https://thedispatch.com/article/the-american-people-deserve-better/*.

What is a sound foreign policy?

Nuland shows no sign of rethinking her ideological commitments, however. A few weeks ago, in a speech at the Center for Security and International Studies marking the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, she declared: “Our continued support for Ukraine tells tyrants and autocrats everywhere … that we will defend the rights of free people to determine their own future … and that the world’s democracies will defend the values and principles that keep us safe and strong.”

Such rhetoric shouldn’t be dismissed as pure posturing. Rather, proponents of realism and restraint in foreign policy must reckon with the fact that statements like these reflect the hawks’ deep-seated, immensely consequential convictions about America and its place in the world. Put another way: Nuland & Co. really do mean it when they say such things—and that lack of cynicism is precisely what makes them so terrifying. Their conception of foreign policy as an endless international crusade against ideological enemies, rather than a tool for realizing state interests, fails the American people and risks bringing the world to the precipice of catastrophe.

Mark Episkopos, The False Religion of Unipolarity

WPATH

Carcinogenic transitions

→ WPATH Files: This week, the leading organization for doctors who perform gender transitions on minors is reeling from a major leak of internal documents, emails, and conference calls. What the leak mostly shows: doctors really had no idea about a lot of the long-term impact of these interventions. Would the kids put on blockers and then cross-sex hormones ever be able to orgasm? Wow, we’re finding out that they can’t, because they’re saying they can’t. Will puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones (the yellow brick road of medical transition) stunt a kid’s growth, one clinician asks? Answer seems like yes: “Blockers, by suppressing puberty, keep growth plates open longer, so younger teens have a potential to grow longer, however their growth velocity is typically at prepubertal velocity, without typical growth spurt.” Or watch this video of clinicians trying to figure out how to get their 14-year-old patients to do informed consent to lifetime sterility (often starting at age 9 with puberty blockers). From the video: “It’s a real growing edge in our field to figure out how we can approach that. I’m definitely a little stumped on it.” I am also stumped on how to get gender-dysphoric children to consent to sterility—maybe we can wait till they’re 18? Just an idea. Just a thought. One practitioner talks about meeting former patients now in their 20s who want to start families, and he jokes that when they find him, he responds: “Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you?”

The biggest news is that these groups knew that the hormone therapies were causing cancer. I’ve said it before, but as a one-time butch teenager with rabid political opinions and the knowledge that I was Correct About Everything, now a happy gay adult with no political opinions and the knowledge that I am Usually Wrong: thank god this movement wasn’t around when I was 14. That said, when I’m done having kids, given the state of things post-breastfeeding, a double mastectomy sounds sort of nice. 

Nellie Bowles

Monsters

Newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.

I’ve downloaded the files but have only heard excerpts from critics of WPATH. The files are so damning that WPATH has not admitted their authenticity nor, to my knowledge, have they denied it. Since mainstream media don’t like to be shown up as gullible, they’ve embargoed stories on the WPATH files for now.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer, has an unusual beef with WPATH. It might be distilled thus: “Doctors who medically transition adolescents are doing so with disregard for autism, mental health comorbidities, and questionably “informed consent. The consequence is that countless kids who have translated their homosexual urges into ‘I’m in the wrong body’ are being sexually mutilated and rendered non-orgasmic.”

But that’s how I would have distilled it last week. Now, with the release of the WPATH files, he’s white-hot:

What does one say of medical professionals who experiment on children in this fashion, and then publicly lie about it? One thing we can say is that they are not medical professionals. And WPATH is not a medical professional outfit, like, say, the American Medical Association. It has many activists and nutballs as members who have no medical or mental health expertise. But in so far as its “guidelines” are used by real medical groups and real doctors, and taken as gospel by woke MSM hacks, it has huge influence and no guardrails. What we are discovering is a grotesquely unethical experiment on vulnerable gender-dysphoric (and often gay) children, performed without meaningful consent, based on manipulative lies (the suicide canard), and defended by a conscious campaign of rank misinformation and ideological bullying.

I used to think there was some good in some of this, and that these experiments were being conducted with entirely good intentions by ethical doctors, who would never violate the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” We all know better now. These quacks treat informed consent as optional, deploy emotional blackmail to alter a child’s endocrine system for life, and care little about the long-term consequences for the victims of their lucrative craft. They have never seen a guardrail protecting children that they didn’t want to remove — and recently abolished any lower limits on the ages at which children can be transed.

At some point the perpetrators of this unethical abuse of vulnerable, troubled kids need to face consequences, and not just in the broken, mutilated bodies of the children they have so callously abused.

Lawyers with the balls to buck the narrative and sue these monsters for malpractice deserve the rich financial rewards they’ll work so very hard to get.

Lost in the Cosmos

Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Walker Percy, *Lost in the Cosmos

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

March 5, 2024

Art

Popular “unpopular art”

[A]art is in a peculiar and dangerous position these days. This week, over 17,000 artists and activists signed an open letter demanding that Israeli artists be excluded from the Venice Biennale festival in Italy, simply because they are Israelis. And even while that attempt at censorship is launched, other artists proclaim how brave they are for art on certain pet causes, violating taboos that no one has enforced for decades and everyone they know already mocks. There is no real cost to such stands.

Joseph Bottum

Popular art

Meet Frankey, the Street Artist Delighting Amsterdam – The New York Times (shared link, no paywall). I was afraid this story would be about another Banksy type graffiti artist (I viscerally hate graffiti). Not at all. It’s sheer whimsical delight.

IVF

The ephemeral threat to IVF

In June 2022, the court ended federal access to abortion, kicking abortion policy back to the states.

Since then, nine states—Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have outlawed abortion outright, not even allowing the procedure when women become pregnant through rape or incest. (Alabama’s IVF ruling is the most extreme pro-life ruling yet.) …

How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’ | The Free Press

Alabama Supreme Court’s decision might ramify unpopularly, bearing in mind the conservative adage that there are popular “unpopular opinions” (i.e., “popular among our leftcoastal readers, less so in flyover country”) and unpopular “unpopular opinions (i.e., “popular among the fundamentalist deplorables in flyover country but vilified by leftcoastal types).

But I digress. The Alabama decision was a ruling in favor of IVF-availing parents whose frozen embryos were negligently destroyed by another patient for lack of safeguards at the IVF clinic. There were no sinister designs on IVF in the opinion at all.* So constantly throwing the decision into the abortion mix strikes me as shit-stirring clickbait.

And “they” must stir the shit, and bait the clicks, vigorously and now, because IVF is in fact popular and the Alabama legislature is hastening to protect it from unintended consequences of the Court’s decision. (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

* Alabama’s Supreme Court had earlier ruled that wrongful death action was allowed to parents for loss of descendants en ventre sa mere; the recent case clarified that intrauterine or extrauterine descendants were within contemplation of the parental wrongful death law.

The case against IVF

While we’re on the subject, I think it’s important for people in secure positions occasionally to voice unpopular unpopular opinions — opinions that others may be too cancelable to voice.

For the record, I have serious moral qualms about IVF, based on a combination of (a) knowing that in the U.S., IVF practice knowingly creates large numbers of embryos that will eventually be destroyed and (b) some Roman Catholic influence that tells me babies should be made in marital beds, not laboratories.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know briefly sketches the Roman Catholic case against IVF (thought his immediate target is cloning).

So you would say that aspirin, surgery to remove a tumor, and cloning “respect” nature, too.
Not cloning.
Why not? Doesn’t it assist the natural function of having babies?
Once more: our nature is our design. We are designed to have babies, but we are not designed to have them in that way. To put it another way, our design includes not only certain ends but certain means. There is a difference between repairing the reproductive system and bypassing it.
Well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anyway.
I think it is a very big deal. When you try to turn yourself into a different kind of being, you are not only doing wrong but asking for trouble. He who ignores the witness of his design will have to face the witness of natural consequences.

If you think this argument has (not “should have”) any appreciable political valence in the USA, you need to get a grip. I’m just saying it should have some valence.

I don’t know where I ultimately would come out on IVF it were there an opportunity to discuss it, not just Roman Catholic voices crying in the wilderness versus reflexive dismissal of those voices.

Law

Witless Ape returns to ballot

[I]t was a perfectly defensible position to hold that Trump should be disqualified. What was indefensible was the air of swaggering certainty that permeated so many of those takes. … self-evident. Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.

Damon Linker

David French was in the “Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.” camp, and he’s not going down without a final howl of protest:

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

David French

I guess the Supreme Court considers whether it’s best to shade the law when following it fearlessly could unleash chaos. It’s days like yesterday that make that obvious, indisputable.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson for the “Witless Ape” image; he minted it, and the linked item is a classic.)

The exceedingly long arm of Russian law

The media reported last week that Russian authorities had arrested Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen, and charged her with treason for donating a nominal sum to an organization that aids Ukraine … The charges against Ms. Karelina are an assault on what it means to be American. The Russian state contends that for a U.S. citizen to make a donation to a U.S. charity and to attend a peaceful protest on U.S. soil is a punishable offense on arrival in Russia.

Dora Chomiak in the Wall Street Journal

Trump’s immunity claims

People who want Donald Trump tried, convicted and jailed before November, for acts while he was in office, have my sympathy, but as we head ever deeper into a tit-for-tat polarized political world, I must substantially agree with Lee Kovarsky instead: Trump Should Lose. But the Supreme Court Should Still Clarify Immunity. – The New York Times.

Trump’s immunity claims are far too broad, but ex-Presidents need at least narrow immunity. Running for high office is already so fraught that I question the sanity of anyone who runs. Add to the existing ugliness the prospect of criminal prosecution, with no possible immunity if the other party wins next time, and we’ll have nobody but saints and sociopaths willing to risk it.

Qualified Immunity

In Indiana, we have a political novice candidate for governor whose first major media buy was an ad with him sitting in a rustic church, slightly misquoting the Bible and earnestly telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It kind of turned my stomach.

The second major media buy was an ad with a well-spoken Rwandan refugee, who became his foster daughter, telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It was much more believable.

His third major media buy simplistically says that qualified immunity (over which governors have little or no control) protects police and so protects us and brillig, and slithey toves, gyring and gimbling in the wabe, and “as governor, your safety will always come first” (sic).

Eric Doden has now lost me for sure. Qualified Immunity, a court-created line-item veto, effectively turns “every person” in 42 USC §1983 into “precious few people.”

Miscellany

[Expletive deleted] AI

It is not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Hitler. Both have had a significant impact on society, but in different ways.

Google’s Gemini AI via Nellie Bowles

Pride before the Fall

No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Such words smacked of hubris, the excessive pride that goes before a fall. And so they would turn out to be, expressing a mistaken vision that would lead to cruel and tragic consequences for the South. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and its prices would never fall, the South would become fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale but that achieved such productivity at an incalculable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with changing moral sensibilities in the world, and with fundamental American ideals.

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

Psychological Man

My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question, given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man’s world, to which he did not belong.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Where paranoia is the mark of sophistication

In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

David French, Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA


So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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