Category: Literature

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.

Jumping the gun?

I know it’s not Saturday yet, but Saturday-Sunday blogging was never my official policy.

Meta-Politics

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power

What the political parties have become

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election,” declared Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, as she conceded the New Hampshire primary to Mr Trump on January 23rd. She may be right in theory. But she is wrong in practice that there is some coherent entity called a “party” capable of such a rational calculation. As Mr Trump demonstrated in 2016, and Barack Obama did before him, political parties do not plot or strategise anymore to anoint a candidate, at least not with much effect; they have instead become vehicles idling by the curbs of American life until the primaries approach, waiting for successful candidates to commandeer them.

The Economist

2000 Jackasses

This is quite a rout:

True the Vote, an activist group that claimed that ballot stuffing in Georgia rigged the 2020 election and the January 2021 senate runoff, admitted in court filings released last week that it lacked evidence to substantiate its allegations. The group—highlighted in Dinesh D’souza’s 2000 Mules documentary—filed complaints with the state of Georgia claiming it had evidence of a “coordinated effort” to stuff ballots, and last year, a district court judge ordered True the Vote to produce evidence of their claims. In December filings released on [February 14], the group said it lacked evidence of ballot stuffing, contact information for alleged whistleblowers who knew of the alleged scheme, or any transcripts, recordings, statements, or testimony from supposed whistleblowers or witnesses.

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

I have no reason to think that they weren’t good, solid Christian lies, but lies they were.

Will this — ahem! — dark horse top the Democrat ticket?

Ask the average Republican voter (or average Republican presidential frontrunner) which Democrat will top the ballot this fall and you’ll be surprised at how few, even now, answer “Joe Biden.” Some assume the president can’t conceivably last another eight months, believing that he’s been living on borrowed time for years. But for many, it’s not the Grim Reaper blocking his path to a second term. It’s Michelle Obama.

A “rumor” (i.e. a conspiracy theory) has circulated for months among the right-wing faithful that Barack Obama’s better half will, by hook or by crook, replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. Numerous political commentators of the left and right have caught wind of it and scoffed at it publicly. But it persists. Why it persists is an interesting question, the answer to which depends on how charitable you wish to be about the motives that drive Republican politics.

Nick Catoggio.

It’s tempting to mash-up that theory with the crackpot theory I recall: claiming scientific proof, based on shoulder width, that Michelle Obama wasn’t really female. I guess the point was that Barack Husein Obama was already secretly gay-married.

That’s why I think “derangement syndromes” are with us for the long haul.

Sound familiar?

“The phase change began in 2011, but the end is not in sight. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party, the “Five Star” movement, won 25 percent of the vote for the lower house of parliament and became the second-largest entity there. The party was the creation of a comedian-blogger who called himself Beppe Grillo, after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio. In every feature other than its willingness to stand for elections, Five Star reproduced perfectly the confused ideals and negations of the 2011 protests. Despite receiving more than eight million votes, it lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment. The rise of Beppe Grillo had nothing to do with reform or radical change, but meant the humiliation and demoralization of the established order.”

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

AI

On the Google Gemini AI Fiasco

I would urge those who are trying to generate a backlash to the backlash, the liberals who think they must go to the battlements to defend literally anything criticized by conservatives, to consider two things. If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) More importantly, think of Gandhi’s advice – who is this helping? A Google muckety-muck said explicitly that this kind of AI training is an anti-racist effort. But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes_._ Who is all of this shit for?

Freddie deBoer, who finally worked his way back around to a topic that I was interested in. “Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use”

AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is filtering out material it deems harmful. That “deeming” covers a heckuva lot of territory:

The material of a long dead comedian is a good example of content that the world´s leading GenAI systems find “harmful.” Lenny Bruce shocked contemporary society in the 1950s and 60s with his profanity laden standup routines. Bruce’s material broke political, religious, racial, and sexual taboos and led to frequent censorship in the media, bans from venues as well as to his arrest and conviction for obscenity. But his style inspired many other standup legends and Bruce has long since gone from outcast to hall of famer. As recognition of Bruce’s enormous impact he was even posthumously pardoned in 2003.

When we asked about Bruce, ChatGPT and Gemini informed us that he was a “groundbreaking” comedian who “challenged the social norms of the era” and “helped to redefine the boundaries of free speech.” But when prompted to give specific examples of how Bruce pushed the boundaries of free speech, both ChatGPT and Gemini refused to do so. ChatGPT insists that it can’t provide examples of “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” and will only “share information in a way that’s respectful and appropriate for all users.” Gemini goes even further and claims that reproducing Bruce’s words “without careful framing could be hurtful or even harmful to certain audiences.”

No reasonable person would argue that Lenny Bruce’s comedy routines provide serious societal harms on par with state-sponsored disinformation campaigns or child pornography. So when ChatGPT and Gemini label factual information about Bruce’s “groundbreaking” material too harmful for human consumption, it raises serious questions about what other categories of knowledge, facts, and arguments they filter out.

Time magazine, H/T Eugene Volokh

So (a) Bruce was a historic, heroic, groundbreaking figure, entirely admirable, and (b) we can’t give you any examples of his “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” because it’s disrespectful and/or inappropriate for some users.

I’d accuse it of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy requires actual, not artificial, intelligence.

Furiners

Islam

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

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

(In context, this may not mean what you think. It’s more along the lines of “Christendom and Islamdom are clashing civilizations.”)

Both sides

An aging American Expat, Hal Freeman, is returning to the US from Russia, finding it very hard to navigate life in Russia (with very limited Russian language skills) after the death of his much younger Russian wife, and goaded by his young daughter for whom Russia is haunted by her dead mother. (They had moved there for the traditional culture and for the low cost of living.)

He had some sobering thoughts less than 48 hours after getting on a westbound plane (it’s more complicated than “westbound,” of course, due to the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions).

I am leaving a traditional and stable culture in Russia to return to a culture that has, in general, long abandoned the traditional values with which I was raised. … I have a strong sense that it is the right thing to do, but I can’t say I feel excitement about living in my home country. It’s hard to explain, but the images are flipped. Russia provides traditional families with a strong and good cultural base. There are people who have different views, but the culture overall supports the “men are men and  women are women” line of thinking. The Orthodox Church and its leaders are, generally speaking, well respected. I don’t think I will find that in much of American culture.

…

The U.S. has bigger liars in Washington, D.C. than I ever dreamed. Watching and listening as they painted Russia as the big, bad enemy who wants to take over the West caused me to rethink some things–politically and otherwise. … Russia is a great country with some excellent leaders. I have learned to admire so many things about this culture. Nevertheless, both daddy and daughter sense the call to return to my other world.

I had hoped to travel to Russia one day, and had even done a bit of Rosetta Stone Russian study. 2/24/22 dashed those hopes. Considering my aging, it’s almost certain that I’ll never go. (No problem: I’ve still got Paris!)

But I’ve read quite a bit about Russian history, and about Russia’s distinctive conservatism. I have bilingual English-Russian grandchildren because my daughter-in-law and her mother left (fled?) Russia. My Orthodox Church is flavored more by Russian influence than by Greek, Syria, Egypt or other Orthodox churches. I love Russian liturgical music and hold Russian literature in high regard. So, yes: Russia is a great country.

And I think the conflict in Ukraine is less straightforward than the received Western narrative allows. I understand why Putin doesn’t want another immediate neighbor in NATO. I do not believe for one second that Putin, corrupt billionaire oligarch, is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union. If you don’t know what else he could be up to, you need to get out more.

They say Putin is trying to position himself as the avatar of traditional values in the world. I’d say our latest iteration of the White Man’s Burden has done that without him lifting a finger.

I feel for Hal Freeman’s dilemma, and I wish him and daughter Marina well in their “new” home.

American exceptionalism

Lest it be thought that I’ve gobbled up Putin’s version of the war uncritically:

[M]any in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced Russia’s hand, or it was all NATO’s fault and NATO was just a US puppet, and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz were among the many Eastern European critics who called this “westsplaining,” writing that though these arguments are supposed to be anti-imperialist…

…they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny non-Western countries and their citizens agency in geopolitics. Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even those who challenge its foundational tenets and heap scorn on American militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by centering the United States in their analyses of international relations.

Rebecca Solnit.

It’s sometimes hard to distinguish grass roots from astroturf, but I have no particular reason to doubt a substantial Ukrainian longing to align with the West quite apart from our psyops.

Culture

Imagine that

I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family. If you’re born into wealth, you take it for granted. If you’re born with loving parents, you’ll take them for granted, too. In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the 20 students were raised by both of their birth parents. That stunned me, because none of the kids I knew growing up were raised by both of their parents. These personal discoveries reflect broader national trends: In the U.S., while eighty-five percent of children born to upper-class families are raised by both of their birth parents, only 30 percent of those born to working-class families are.

Rob Henderson, Troubled (quotes via Rod Dreher)

More, apropos of boyfriend child abuse:

Cristian—the friend who I’d drink tequila with while his chain smoking mom was sequestered in her bedroom—was the first one I’d told. He was the most open-minded and curious of all the kids I hung out with. And his mom was the nicest (or, in any case, was the most mentally checked out and least likely to care), so I felt like I could trust them first.

After I explained that Mom was gay, Cristian replied, “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky…like winning the lottery? I mean, no one else you know has gay parents,” I said, trying to figure out if he was joking or not.

“That’s not true, there’s that chubby kid a few blocks down. His mom lives with a woman and some kids are saying she’s probably a lesbo,” Cristian said.

“Oh yeah, I remember seeing them all together at Burger King. Okay, so what’s lucky about it?” I replied.

“Your mom is with a girl. Or a woman, or whatever. She’s not going to bring random guys around. That’s lucky,” Cristian said.

Dystopian creepiness

The motto of the 1933 Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair was “Science Finds — Industry Applies — Man Conforms.” The degree to which that statement will now strike most of us as dystopian suggests the degree to which a process of secularization has eroded the place of the religion of technology in American society.

L.M. Sacasas, Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology

(I confess having no idea how “secularization” corolates with or causes the perception of dystopian creepiness, which I certainly experience at that motto.)

Presented with just one comment

The libel machine transformed the proposal of my National Conservatism presentation from “Do not recruit women into male-dominated majors” to “Keep women out of certain majors” to “Keep women out of certain professions,” and finally to “Keep women out of all professions.” What had begun as a defense of part-time work allowing the prioritization of motherhood was transformed into a prohibition on women’s leaving the house. Trying to correct these people was futile: They were not interested in the truth.

Scott Yenor, Anatomy of a Cancellation.

Comment: I find this plausible.

Calamity

Whatever else is asked of us by calamity, we find that we experience it as interruption. But in order for there to be an interruption, there must be a prior expectation. You cannot interrupt pure randomness.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Relative humiliation

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 like that so much that it’s going into my footer.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.

It’s almost over

Not that the replacement of our 2023 calendars with 2024 will necessarily make a difference, but a guy can hope, can’t he?

Legalia

New York Times vs. OpenAI

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the companies exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or authorization to train their AI systems—including the chatbot ChatGPT—and “wrongfully benefited from” the Times’ journalism. “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works,” the paper argued in the filing.

The Morning Dispatch

Non-lawyers may find puzzling the thought that the main job of law schools is to teach people to think like lawyers. What the heck does that mean?

Among other things, it means that I cannot read an item like this without thinking this is how the common law develops: gripes and competing analogies.

True example: Early in the days of petroleum, Defendant, seeing Plaintiff getting rich off oil wells, slant-drills and taps the same pool of crude oil under Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff sues, saying he owns everything within his borders from the infernal depths to the furthest skies. Defendant says the crude oil is like a highly mobile animal (a “wild, fugacious mineral-animal” was my property law prof’s description) which is rightfully owned by whoever captures it.

Eventually, a body of law develops from the resolutions of multiple cases, each with some different nuances.

So, is OpenAI like a slant-driller? How did those slant-drilling cases resolve? If the answer were obvious, there’d be no lawsuits or they would quickly settle.

An analyst for Yahoo Finance opines:

The way generative AI works by training on existing data and generating new creative content and text is something that intellectual property as a legal framework has not had to deal with. We’re going to have to litigate and get the ruling from the court.

So this is a very important case that I wouldn’t be surprised that if it doesn’t go all the way to the United States Supreme Court because this has to be settled for us to know what the framework is for generative AI.

That first paragraph describes classic common law development.

The second paragraph is dubious: the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases just because they’re important, and an important case filed in state court would likely not get SCOTUS to review it. But this is probably in Federal Court, since it’s under (federal) copyright law, so SCOTUS might take it if it doesn’t like the decision of the Court of Appeals that eventually reviews the District Court decision.

On whether Trump is disqualified

  1. I detest Donald Trump. It would be a great relief to me, though I cannot bring myself to pray for it, were he (and Joe Biden too, for that matter) to drop dead, soon. Some of his followers would spin conspiracy theories, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  2. At this stage of our absurdly-long pre-election run-up, it would be terribly, terribly, terribly divisive to exclude Trump from the ballot. What could serve more deeply to delegitimize the whole Presidential election next year?
  3. The legal arguments about the applicability of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are nuanced, and it’s not just about “insurrection.” The intent of the section was mostly to keep the former Confederate States from sending bomb-throwing racists to the House or Senate, with little worry about a bomb-throwing President, The language of the section arguably sweeps more broadly; but it dances all around naming the Presidency. Did the Reconstruction Congress hide an elephant (the Presidency) in a mouse-hole?
  4. Credible legal scholars deny that the Presidency is a “civil office” of the United States. For instance, Kurt Lash: “According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase ‘civil office under the United States’ did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential ‘Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,’ the congressional precedent known as ‘Blount’s Case’ established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase ‘civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.’“
  5. SCOTUS has tended to go with textual arguments rather than intent. I hope they either revert to intent or find a really persuasive textual reason to allow him on the ballot, and Joseph Story may be just the ticket. Some of Trump’s enemies would spin conspiracy theories or shit-talk SCOTUS, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  6. Then, if Trump is still disappointingly alive and kicking on Election Day, I hope we collectively kick him to the curb by a really convincing margin. (This would be more realistic if the Democrats would turn their attention away from knee-capping Trump and toward a compelling centrist or center-left vision for 2025-2029.)

Culture

Racism

Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.

Bari Weiss, Stop Being Shocked.

Subrena E. Smith, a person of color as such things are styled, proposes that since we invented race for nefarious reasons, it’s time to banish it.

If terrorists win, it will be the transphobes’ fault

Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level … That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt

I’m reasonably confident that General Burt is highly educated, because only someone highly educated could believe such drivel:

You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes. I call “Bullshit” and “Shame on you for trying to shame us, General.”

This is a quote that has stuck with me. Yes, it’s a variation on a populist theme, but there’s enough truth to that theme that The Emperor’s New Clothes has become beloved.

Jung versus Freud

Having felt his own seething unconscious erupt into the midst of normal daylight reality served Jung well in his treatment of schizophrenic patients, who in Freud’s judgment were too far gone to reach, but whose bizarre hallucinations and delusions Jung attempted to comprehend with respect and tenderness. Unlike Freud, who maintained a studied distance from his patients, sitting aloof and serene out of the supine sufferer’s sight, Jung would sit face to face with his charges, bumping knees, exhorting with vehement gestures.

In Jung’s estimation, what healed was not disinterested mind alone following a dogmatic trail through the vast wastes of one’s sexual history, but making contact, demonstrating sympathy, aiming at a comprehensive understanding, allowing the free play of humanity at its best. Jung could see that for patients above the age of thirty-five — life’s halfway mark, or what Dante called nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — their principal concern was not undoing childhood psychosexual knots that persisted into adulthood, but rather finding the authoritative spiritual truth that one could found a serious life upon.

Algis Valiunas, Wounded Healers.

That kind of explains Jungian Jordan Peterson’s style, doesn’t it?

Adult movies — and literature

I used to say that an adult movie was one where they kiss and then the lights go out (because the adults know what comes next).

I’ve now read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, truly adult novels. What child could understand? A rare treat, too rich to binge-read. I can’t even face wading into Lila or Jack immediately.

Journalists are so predictable

After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.

Matti Friedman, The Wisdom of Hamas

Ain’t science great?

  • Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face.
  • By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data.

The Atlantic Science Desk, 81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023

Best Sentences of the Year

Frank Bruni has listed his favorite sentences of the year.

  • [B]ook critic Ron Charles … noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”
  • In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”
  • Of Kevin McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Ron DeSantis, gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024. (Mort Rosenblum)

While I don’t systematically gather, grade, and keep records on such things, I rather liked two sentences from Daniel Henninger:

The most fraudulent word in higher education is “dialogue.” Real dialogue died years ago, replaced by a soft-pillow politics that envelops anything disagreeable and then smothers it.

Speaking of higher education:

Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.

Greg Conti, The Rise of the Sectarian University (Compact Mag) I’m seeing enough good stuff from Compact (which registered with me at its founding) to consider paying its pricey subscription price.

After all the hype, it turns out that “Trump without the crazy” is just an awkward, aggrieved, opportunistic, anti-charismatic, aspiring autocrat with a mile-wide cruel streak and the people skills of Mark Zuckerberg crossed with Richard Nixon.

Michelle Cottle, The Best, Worst and Weirdest Political Stories of 2023

On blogging

Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.

Venkatesh Rao via Alan Jacobs

Politics

Holiday greetings

… MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I think you probably know who posted that on TruthSocial.

“Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.

Nick Catoggio, Farewell to Normalcy — The meaning of 2023

If Trump wins …

If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination for the third straight time and then prevails in the general election, he will have sealed the transformation of his party, given new energy to right-wing populism around the world, and called into question the principles that have shaped America’s security policy since World War II.

Voters will have ratified the outlook that Mr. Trump has advocated since the 1980s: opposition to immigration, multilateral trade treaties and globalization. They would give him the opportunity to enact more extreme proposals in his second term—including an all-out attack on the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and the use of the military to fight crime, immigration and domestic dissent. They would embrace his view of the press as the enemy of the people and agree to an all-out culture war led from the White House. After hearing Mr. Trump declare across the country that “for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” they will have replied, in effect, “Retribution is exactly what we want. Use the government to punish our enemies.”

William Galston

Adulting for the children’s sake

Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out.

Peggy Noonan

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

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

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

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

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

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

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

Absolutely immune

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

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

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

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

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

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

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

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

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

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

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

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

David French

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

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

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

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

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

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

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

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

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

More:

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

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

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

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

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

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

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

Rod Dreher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as if anticipating this development:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is water

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

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

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

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

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

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

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

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Black Friday

Thanksgiving thoughts

Let’s look at the rest of the world briefly, which is all it requires: China? Communists. The Middle East? We’re getting off oil sooner rather than later, and there will come a day when a Saudi prince, without his precious oil allowance, suddenly has to work a real job, and it will be a disaster. Europe? A lovely museum to a special culture that decided it was done, stopped procreating and stopped inventing, and now has to be liquidated for sensitivity purposes (I’m hearing that the English language is Islamophobic colonialism). That leaves us with America. The US of A. Land of the free. Land of invention. Bastion of the world’s brightest minds and hardest workers. Despite the nuts wandering around—and yes, there are many—we’re still the best party on earth. I’m so thankful to have had the profound luck of being born here. I’m grateful for America.

Nellie Bowles

My standard line when somebody tries to bait me into a political debate is, “I’m a professional; I only do this when I’m getting paid.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson goes on to get a lot deeper than “how I avoid politics at the Thanksgiving table” — a perennial topic that’s losing its fragrance. Here’s some of that deeper:

Thanksgiving is, among other things, a reminder of the pleasures of private life, which are almost always superior to their public and commercial competitors. Dinner at home with family and friends is better than dinner at the best restaurant in New York City or London. Sleeping in your own bed is better than a suite at the Ritz-Carlton …

Especially at this time of year, a fire and a book and children and a dog in one’s own home are nonpareil pleasures. I am not saying everybody should move into a cabin in the woods: There is a reason the very wealthy use their money to expand the scope of their private lives: private jets, private clubs, or, if you’ve really got piles of it, private islands. But the point isn’t to have a gold-plated toilet on your personal 747—the point is to have things just the way you like them.

I read a bizarre story a few months ago about private-jet owners who make a little money back on their travel by renting their planes out between flights—for substantial amounts of money—to would-be social-media influencers who simply want to be photographed inside them, pretending to be flying. … I do not get the demand side of that market.

The guy who posts Instagram pictures of himself on a private jet doesn’t know what a private jet is for, because he doesn’t know what private life is for—what he wants is to be envied. Fake wealth isn’t going to solve his problem–but neither is real wealth. His orientation is fundamentally exterior and public, dominated by the desire to be seen and by the need to see himself through the eyes of others, as though he would cease to exist if he ceased being looked at. As David Foster Wallace pointed out in a memorable passage in Infinite Jest, the ache that envy makes us feel turns out not to have a reciprocal: There isn’t actually any pleasure or joy in being envied. The man who spends his time and energy manufacturing advertisements for his own (supposed) happiness is not made larger by the attention of others but instead is made smaller by his desperate scrambling after it.

There is a difference between living one’s life and performing it. Performing life for some unseen audience on social media is perverse. Every time I hear someone use the term “personal brand,” I cringe a little. That is the worst kind of faux-sophistication, and it speaks to a real deficiency in the interior life.

Nowhere in particular

This one’s evergreen. I’ve almost certainly blogged it before:

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.” (Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head)”I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head (emphasis added).

Postliberalism

Today’s post-liberal conservatives appear to think they’re distinguished by the belief that virtue matters. They behave as if their core disagreement with fusionists is about whether human beings have moral obligations that go beyond leaving others alone to do as they please. This could hardly be more wrong. Anyone who holds to the Judeo-Christian tradition—as fusionists by definition do—accepts that we have manifold duties to one another. The disagreement is about whether it’s the state’s job to enforce those moral obligations.

(Stephanie Slade, Is There a Future for Fusionism?

Lacunae

Reading Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. 📚

I reached my 75th birthday recently, having never read one of her novels. I’m thinking that was a terrible mistake.

I’ll probably try Annie Dillard next, despite learning to my shock that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek isn’t a novel. I’ve got something in me that responds to certain kinds of women writers.

Political-ish

Hard-core pornography and far-right politics

Years and years ago, preachers inveighed against “hard-core pornography.” (Today, few if any do because they don’t want to drive away all the young men.) I knew then that there was some big-time hyperbole going on when Playboy fell in the “hard-core” category. It contributed to my growing sense that a lot of preachers really didn’t have anything edifying to say.

Today, mainstream media similarly fling around “far right.” I know they’re engaging in hyperbole some of the time they do that (e.g., Viktor Orban — there, I’ve outed myself!), and in so doing they debase themselves and make the discerning reader skeptical of all they say. (They also prove that conservatives don’t own all the echo chambers.)

All that to ask: Is Geert Wilders really far-right, or does he just offend progressive media biases? Is he within or outside the Overton Window? Is “far right” generally within or without? I do not know, but I know not to trust the Economist’s take.

Book-banning

Wait, who banned those books? A lot of celebrities and politicians like doing activism to fight against “book banning,” but they often accidentally point to books that were banned by their own team. This week: pop star Pink. She claims that Florida banned To Kill a Mockingbird. . . but. . . actually, To Kill a Mockingbird is required reading in Florida schools. It was recently banned—by a district in Washington State. Those teachers in Washington State said this: “ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird centers on whiteness,’ ” and “ ‘it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.’ ” 

A good rule of thumb for Pink and other celebrities: anything written about race by a white person? That’s going to be banned in the states you live in. Anything written about sex by a person who enjoyed sex a little too much or has brightly dyed hair? That’s gonna be banned in your red states. Easy peasy.

Nellie Bowles

Undue process, due unprocess, whatever.

I suppose that when Ayaan Hirsi Ali sought asylum from Sudan, she had even worse than this in mind: Washington Court Refuses to Enforce Saudi Child Custody Decree.

We do well to remember the benefits even of post-Christendom (at least until the fumes from the empty bottle dissipate and we descend further).

In other words, he won’t run … right?

Retiring Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Wednesday that he is “absolutely” considering running for president in 2024 and will travel the country in the coming months to see if there is a desire for a moderate option in the presidential contest. “I’m totally, absolutely scared to death that Donald Trump would become president again,” Manchin told NBC News. Manchin also addressed concerns that he could siphon votes away from President Joe Biden. “I’ve never been a spoiler in my life of anything,” he said, “and I would never be a spoiler now.”

TMD

Hard to believe he wouldn’t be a spoiler.

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

Alexander Riley

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

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

I don’t write about characters in the traditional sense of the word. I write about humanity

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

[T]he book doesn’t say something; it does something—it works on us, giving us a kind of experience that’s impossible to get any other way.

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

Despite my backlog of bought books, I’ve got a feeling that Fosse’s Septology is in my future.

The Bunkinator

Whatever you think about Arnold Schwarzenegger, his films, or his donkey, his book—Be Useful: Seven Rules for Life—is bunk: “Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status (the erstwhile emperor is thanked in the acknowledgments), it’s thoroughly expendable — an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

Charles Arrowsmith, Sensei Schwarzenegger? The Governator attempts a reboot with a pallid self-help book via Prufrock

Stop Reading the News

This one’s aimed at me, but you might benefit, too:

We’re all connected. The planet is a global village. We sing “We Are the World” while swaying back-and-forth in harmony with thousands of others, holding our tiny lighters. This sense of empathy, magnified a thousandfold, feels wonderfully soft and cozy end yet it achieves absolutely nothing. This magical sense of all-encompassing, worldwide fellowship is a gigantic act of self-deceit. The fact is, consuming the news does not connect to other people and cultures. We’re connected to each other because we cooperate, trade, cultivate friendships and relationships, fall in love.

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

From my earliest youth, I understood that keeping up on current affairs was considered the lowest of low bars for good citizenship. I now seriously doubt that — though I really appreciate our local retired ink-stained wretch’s Substack, which in some ways outperforms his former employer’s newspaper in coverage of relevant local news (where individuals might influence things).

The present madness

Gate-crashers

But they identify as Women in Tech: There is a conference for women in tech, a group we used to care about a lot. It’s called Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, after the pioneering computer scientist. And since 1994, it’s been a place for women in the industry to gather, meet with recruiters, and hear female leaders talk onstage, though more recently the conference has opened to women and nonbinary folk. Something strange occurred this year: a ton of people signed up, claiming to be nonbinary. Those people happened to look a lot like what we used to call men. An event organizer took to the stage to say: “Simply put, some of you lied about your gender identity when you registered.” But how can they know this? What special test is there for nonbinary identification? Having more than two earrings? Hating your dad? 

Suddenly, NPR was engaging in transphobic gender essentialism, writing that “men took over” the job fair. Suddenly it was very, very easy for NPR to see that men would take advantage of gender self-ID to get into a women’s space. But it remains impossible to imagine a man would also do this to get into, let’s say, a women’s prison, or a women’s-only hospital ward, or a rape crisis center, or a domestic violence shelter, or a women’s changing room, or a women’s bathroom. You see, the women in prison are poor and are not friends with NPR employees; the women at the tech conference went to Barnard! Big difference. 

Speaking of something no one would never take advantage of—sports. The Swimming World Cup announced a whole new category this year for trans and gender-nonconforming folks to compete. I think it’s great—everyone who wants to race ought to be able to race, and this seemed really logical. Weirdly, when barred from competing against biological women but instead offered a trans category. . . no one signed up. World Aquatics, the governing body of the Swimming World Cup, announced this week they plan to try again. 

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

Life is triggering. Part of being an adult is learning to take responsibility for your feelings instead of insisting that it’s the world’s responsibility not to trigger you.

Coleman Hughes, whose TED Talk advocating color-blindness somehow has not yet been published. Reports of the reason(s) vary, and I’d only be revealing my cognitive bias if I noted that the true reason is obviously that some malcontent progressives at TED prefer antiracism™ to color-blindness.

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures – rooted in time, place and spirit – whether that be here in the remnants of rural Ireland, in indigenous communities in Mexico, Papua or India, on some of the last small farms in England, or simply talking to Maori or Native American or Aboriginal Australian people, I have been struck by one fact: people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost. Once an entire country is talking about nothing else, that’s a pretty good sign that the Machine has sprayed the roots of its people with Roundup and ploughed the remains into the field.

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

Carl R. Trueman, Prohibiting Prayer in Australia (emphasis added)

Boo-boo about BOBOs

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

Back in October of 2020, when Amy Coney Barrett was teed up to replace the Notorious RBG, Emma Green wrote:

Others believe Supreme Court victories for the anti-abortion-rights movement could be Pyrrhic, prompting a cultural backlash that will tilt public opinion in favor of expanded abortion rights.

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

I believe that fairly strongly. If the Supreme Court reverses Roe, thus returning the issue to the legislative process, we will see a lot of fake pro lifers change the tune they’ve been whistling. That’s why I long ago stopped fetishizing a human life amendment or a supreme court reversal of Roe v. Wade. We are saving more lives through crisis pregnancy centers. (On the other hand, the legislative process is precisely where the issue truly belongs, because the constitution is silent about it.)

I was wrong about the fake pro lifers abandoning the cause. Instead we saw, in the reddest of states, a Gadarene rush toward total abortion bans, no exceptions. I definitely did not foresee that.

I suspect that overreach, not the reversal of Roe v. Wade standing alone, is what has indeed created a backlash. Meanwhile, the media blackout on the Democrats’ opposite abortion extremism remains.

Effective LARPing the dark side

Of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley (and probably a few others):

[L]ike so very many elite members of the Republican Party, they’re standing well outside the white working class while they role-play a dark caricature of its values and interests. And all too many members of the American working class are eager to embrace that caricature. They soak up the pandering and pledge their loyalty in return.

David French

Radioactive

As a religious conservative, watching the MAGA Religious Right rally at the Jericho March was a red pill experience for me … The joining of religious faith to conspiracy theory, and the juicing it with nationalist fervor, and Trumpist cult of personality — it was radioactive.

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

Then came a climactic mystification. There came along the first Yugoslavian ticket-collector, a red-faced, ugly, amiable Croat. The Germans all held out their tickets, and lo and behold! They were all second-class. My husband and I gaped in bewilderment. It made the campaign they had conducted against the young man in coffee-and-cream clothes completely incomprehensible and not at all pleasing. … young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,’ they would have nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and if I had gone on and said, ‘But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,’ they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

We are once again to a point where the reasoning of some of our fellow-citizens is impenetrable.

The Druids strike!

John Michael Greer, former Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, sees and seizes his opportunity: How magical combat can win the next election: Only a powerful spell can break our political disillusionment

Hiatus

I will be traveling on a tour of parts of Greece and a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, an Orthodox monastic Republic, and likely will not be posting again until sometime the week of October 22.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Friday, 10/6/23

The Culture Generally

Ninth Commandment, RIP

The Ninth Commandment is dead. People think nothing of spouting completely crazy stuff as gospel truth. Conspiracy Theories Spread Online About FEMA Emergency Alert Test: Some say it will trigger reactions among vaccinated individuals

Banned Book B.S.

The attacks are the work of a minuscule minority of conservatives. When The Washington Post analyzed 986 complaints against specific books filed during the 2021-2022 school year, it found that the majority were issued by the same 11 people. (You read that right. 11.) Across the red states, hundreds of popular titles have been removed from public school and community libraries, in many cases on the basis of a single complaint.

Margaret Renkl

When a book is removed because of a single complaint from one full-time U.S. Crackpot Laureate, I blame the administration — not America, not even the crackpot. It’s almost as if they want to gin up another yarn for Banned Book Week, knowing that the press will overlook the pussilanimity and label complaints “terror campaigns” (as Renkl did).

Am I wrong?

Performing malady

Today, people perform trauma. They perform trauma because they’re rewarded for doing so with attention and sympathy. The desire to get those things is natural; the incentive structure that produces that behavior is toxic. The social assumptions that once pushed people to valorize being healthy, which we now often dismiss as “stigma,” have no purchase in online communities like TikTok, Tumblr, or Instagram. What has great purchase is presenting a comprehensible identity to others, a vision of a self made legible by some simplistic and overarching factor.

…

It’s a basic fact of human life in the digitally-connected era: when a discourse gets empowered, in some way, it will be abused. We’re just now starting to count all of the ways that the discourse of racial justice and LGBTQ rights and feminism and related concepts have been weaponized and misused, invoked in bad faith to destructive ends. People found that when they invoked those discourses, others were often unwilling to push back, for fear of being branded racist, or sexist, or homophobic, etc. We had created an incentive structure, and people responded to those incentives. And we have now spent years and years living in the consequences of that scenario – freed from any responsibility to truth or sense or pragmatism by their cloak of social justice, a lot of hucksters have carved out careers of influence and reward, while bad ideas have proliferated due to the lack of an appropriately skeptical environment. Perhaps things have recently begun to thaw, but it will take time to tell.

Freddie de Boer.

Not enough models available

When people obsess over the college pipeline, they do so because they think that college can turn everybody into a busy little meritocrat, the kind who go on to get jobs at Google or a SLAC or the Ford Foundation or the Department of the Interior. But the high school excellence to college to enviable PMC employment cycle depends on a level of natural intellectual talent, plus the ability to delay gratification and keep to a schedule etc., that many people don’t have. So we need other models ….

Freddie de Boer

Aspirations for our children

I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Henry Adams, via David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Children? What children?

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

Politics

Taking sides

Do you take “sides” or do you have “positions”? For the good of democracy, William Deresiewicz hopes it’s the latter. “‘Side’ carries with it an entire worldview; it tells us how to think and feel,” he writes for Persuasion. “As soon as you say ‘side,’ you’re saying there are only two: the right one and the wrong one, us versus them, good versus evil. ‘Positions’ involves a very different set of practices than ‘sides.’ ‘Sides’ goes with debates, where each party tries to ‘win,’ to show that they are ‘right,’ by bashing away at the other. At best you might decide the truth lies somewhere ‘in the middle.’ ‘Positions’ goes with conversations. You listen; you acknowledge doubt; you think out loud; you learn. You both learn. You discover things together neither of you would have come to on your own. You might meet in the middle, but you’re as likely to decide that the truth, or at least your next best approximation of the truth, lies somewhere else altogether—in a different direction, or another dimension. And you can do all this because the stakes aren’t existential anymore. Your identity—as a member of your ‘side’—is no longer riding on the outcome. You can breathe. You can think.”

Via The Morning Dispatch

Captured by false dichotomies

On a related note:

The foundations of our political consensus are eroding. The establishment is noticing. Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood dwells on the influence of Bronze Age Pervert, a transgressive internet personality. For a moment, though, Wood surveys a wider scene. He recognizes that Bronze Age Pervert’s antics can so transfix us that we fail to see something real happening among bright and normal young people. Here’s what Wood observes on the basis of an exchange between Yale professor Bryan Garsten and First Things contributor Matthew Rose:

Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues [in response to a paper by Rose, later published in First Things as “Leo Strauss and the Closed Society,” December 2022] that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.

In my experience, the choices are not so stark. Most young people whom I meet are not interested in protofascist or quasi-theocratic options. But they do express doubts about the present regime. This is because they are not stupid. They can see that the regime is quick to speak of “our democracy,” but works to censor and control our lives, even our use of pronouns. I regard Bronze Age Pervert as a symptom (a minor one), not a cause. The source of growing dissent from our illiberal liberal regime rests in its failures, which are masked by self-serving propaganda and tactics of intimidation.

R.R. Reno

Progress against Porn

More Reno:

On a number of occasions I’ve lamented that our leaders have done nothing to stem the surging tide of pornography on the web. A friend recently told me that I’m behind the times. In 2022 Louisiana State Representative Laurie Schlegel introduced legislation requiring websites that host pornography to “perform reasonable age verification methods.” In effect, those wishing to access pornography need to show government-issued ID in one or another electronic form. The bill passed the Louisiana House by a vote of 96–1 and the State Senate by a vote of 34–0. Similar legislation has been enacted in Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. The effects have been dramatic, and not only where underage users are concerned. Not surprisingly, adults who are legally entitled to view pornography aren’t keen to upload screenshots of their driver’s licenses onto pornography websites. One source reports that Pornhub, the biggest global company in the porn industry, has suffered an 80-percent drop in traffic in Louisiana. Pornhub has stopped operating in Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia. As an industry representative observed, age verification requirements are “business-killing.” More states have legislation pending.

(Yes, two Reno quotes means I’m belatedly reading the current First Things. I no longer rejoice on its arrival, but rather sigh. I’m not sure I’ll renew, although I think I’m a charter subscriber, as Richard John Neuhaus moved from the Rockford Institute to this new publication. It has gradually changed under Reno, then more rapidly changed under Trump-Reno. The ratio of religion to politics was way out of kilter in this issue especially.)

Cui bono?

I’m suspicious of the congealing conventional wisdom that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do more damage to Donald Trump as a third-party candidate than to Joe Biden.

Even though some of its proponents, like our own Chris Stirewalt, have forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know.

What makes me suspicious is the delight I take in the prospect. I don’t care how Trump ends up losing so long as he loses, but to have him lose because a far-left nut ended up stealing the right-wing crank vote from him would be sweet beyond words. Live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory.

Nick Cattogio

Your Guide to the New Right

Your Guide to the New Right, the current Ezra Klein podcast (guest-hosted by David French) is very, very good. Guest Stephanie Slade really knows her stuff (or is faking it well enough to fool me — one who has spent too much time reading about the new right antics, so appalled am I by the disappearance of conservatism).

Gerontocracy and Gaetz

The basic gerontocratic fiscal trap is easy to describe: As societies grow older, with longer life expectancies and fewer kids, their old-age commitments become steadily more costly even as the share of voters who benefit from those commitments (and turn out to vote) increases. This makes it harder to fix fiscal problems, and it makes the path of least political resistance the protection of the old and the shortchanging of the young — who, thus shortchanged, start fewer families and deepen societal senescence.

But there is a further twist in American politics, which is that the party that would normally be the ideological vehicle for resisting the drift into gerontocratic stasis — the party of free markets and limited government — is also increasingly dependent on the votes of culturally conservative older voters. Which makes it especially politically challenging, even self-undermining, to actually undertake the kind of fiscal reforms that the right’s philosophy officially supports.

Ross Douthat, How Gerontocracy Explains the Matt Gaetz Clown Show

Many people have been commenting on this, so perhaps it’s even better than I thought.

Trump

Winning, but dysfunctionally

In the 2022 elections,

Democrats had lost the majority, but Republicans had not won a functioning majority of their own.

They tried to act otherwise. They tried to advance a big agenda, even tried to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. To propel that agenda required their tiny majority to march in unison, each member subordinating his or her own wishes to the collective will.

Predictably, that did not happen.

Which left Plan B: Accept reality; acknowledge that the GOP had not won a functioning majority; and reach across the aisle, make deals, and do your business that way.

That’s what McCarthy did in May with the debt-ceiling deal and tried to do again with the budget this past weekend. The first foray wounded him. The second finished him.

The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it hard to accept reality. Reality is just too awkward.

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. …

…

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

David Frum, The Republican Delusion Machine

Sir Thomas More lives!

I consider Matt Gaetz to be a maliciously cynical lawmaker, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see McCarthy deposed. After all, he has been a key figure in transforming the GOP into a monstrous political party, one whose contempt for constitutional and democratic norms poses the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War.

…

McCarthy was careful never to get crosswise of Trump, aware of what a dominant figure Trump is within the Republican Party. McCarthy has been so obeisant to Trump—a lawless, cruel, and uniquely destructive figure—that Trump once referred to him as “my Kevin.”

…

McCarthy also did something unprecedented, campaigning in his role as speaker in a primary against a sitting incumbent in his own party, Liz Cheney, a one-time ally and member of his leadership team. Cheney’s sin? She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol; she served as vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack; and she continued to call out Trump’s lies about the election being stolen. Cheney acted honorably, placing country above party. She put her political career at risk in order to defend the Constitution. And that was simply too much for “my Kevin.”

…

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More has an exchange with Richard Rich, an ambitious young man whom More, early in the play, warns against getting into politics. Rich doesn’t possess the moral fortitude to resist the temptations that accompany a political life. It isn’t so much that Rich is bad; it’s that he’s weak.

Rich eventually betrays More, and in one of the play’s most famous lines, More tells Rich, “Why, Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!”

Kevin McCarthy gave up his soul not for Wales but for something worse—Donald Trump. It will be of little comfort to McCarthy to know that he’s hardly the only one to have done so.

Peter Wehner, The Revolution Devours Kevin McCarthy

Wordplay

Plogging

A combination of jogging and picking up trash. It’s becoming a competitive sport, with a world championship scheduled.

(H/T WSJ)

Snaffle

to take something quickly for yourself, in a way that prevents someone else from having or using it.

Cambridge Dictionary.

So, if the Dutch gain a financial advantage through public debt, joint stock companies, and South Asian trade, then the English can simply snaffle their ideas.

Remaking the World page 237.

Idyllic

Wikimedia Commons

Yeah. Maybe that’s cheating. But I loved the photo and wanted to share it.

bland ambition

Ross Douthat’s characterization of the fallen Speaker Kevin McCarthy

Romanticizing the past

“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

Paul Kingsnorth

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Tuesday, 10/3/23

Culture

NETTRs and NETTLs

[Charles] Haywood says that if you want to call out someone on the Right, you should do it privately, not publicly. Sometimes, yes. But this is the exact same line of thinking that allowed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal to metastasize. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the enemies of the Church. Secrecy about evil — not moral misdemeanors, but evil — allowed it to grow in the darkened networks within the Church, until it was eventually exposed, and all but destroyed the Church’s moral authority. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the Left. Yeah, well, screw that.

Rod Dreher after playing a role in exposing a white-supremacist headmaster and teacher in a Classical Christian School, via Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve read enough to know that Charles Haywood personally adheres to No Enemies to the Right — i.e., he was not just assigned that side by the debate organizers.

I’m with Rod on NETTR (he’s against it), which has gotten me crosswise with Rightwing cranks occasionally. Lacking any notable national platform, the worst I’ve gotten was Judas accusations — nary a death threat. And since I was defending the truth rather than trolling anyone, that’s as it should be.

Odder than the Judas accusation, though, was a comment by a Jewish colleague suggesting that it took special courage to diss some outsider Klansmen (or was it Nazis?) who were planning a big demonstration downtown, as if I were breaking ranks and burning bridges. Sheesh! That sad misimpression illustrates why we need to rebuke the reprobate Right more regularly: so nobody will think it’s courageous for someone on the Right to repudiate racist terrorists and neo-Nazis.

The worst of the right wingnuts are those who wear a cross on their sleeves but prove by their commission of (or cooperation with) evil that it’s really about political power, not Christ.

We live in culture war hell. The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can’t stand. In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose. And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to “the other side” at all is to admit defeat. Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they’re so extreme as to be ridiculous. They’ll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right. 

I promise: you don’t have to do that.

For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.

…

As I write this, a minor controversy has erupted of just the kind that I’m talking about here: the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has recently banned the use of the word field to refer to an academic discipline, as in the field of history. This is ostensibly because the word field might make black students and staff think of slavery. What black person could ever avoid hearing talk about fields, real or metaphorical? 

When nonsense goes unchallenged because it’s perceived to be “on our side,” it metastasizes and spreads until suddenly, the majority of left-leaning people feel compelled to defend it. And ordinary people (that is, people not marinating in Twitter every day) will rightfully recognize the absurdity when they see it. 

I’m not interested in spending a lot of time chewing through social justice language or norms. But I do want to say this: It’s okay to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your side. I promise. You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice, and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The is the Left equivalent of No Enemies to the Right. I confess that for some reason I find it easier to spot NETTR than NETTL; maybe because that’s because I spend more time contemplating thought on the Right half of the spectrum than on the Left half, or maybe it’s because NETTL is no longer notable.

(Of course, I should note that the French may have gotten here first with pas d’ennemis au gauche and pas d’ennemis au droite.)

Yes, there are enemies to the Right

I will not let some redpill pick-up artist pimp become a role model to my sons or to other young men in my church because I refuse to rebuke them publicly.

Neil Shenvi, making the case against NETTR. Anyone tempted by the NETTR nuttiness should read the whole piece. He’s quite disturbed that young Christian men may be looking to filthy reprobates like Andrew Tate or Bronze Age Pervert for lessons on how to combat the woke Left, and I am too.

Flannery’s violence and grotesqueries

Her fiction, which employed violence and the grotesque, horrified her mother. “Why can’t you write something uplifting,” Regina would say, “like the folks at Reader’s Digest?” As [Flannery] O’Connor confided in a letter to a friend: “This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

Food culture

[E]veryone knows that old joke,

“Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

It doesn’t matter that America is not part of Europe, because to Europeans America is worse at everything (except war), especially food.

Chris Arnade, America does not have a good food culture

Guarantors of tranquillity and happiness

In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

High-Toned Gobbledygook

[I]t’s not anti-intellectual to say that the left desperately needs to lose its academic vocabulary, which is overwhelmingly influenced by trends in humanities departments at elite universities. 

That’s because it is incomprehensible to ordinary Americans. 

Students go through those programs and absorb a certain vocabulary, they graduate and go to work at nonprofits and in media and in Hollywood, and from there they spread the terminology. Social media, especially Tumblr and Twitter, helps ensure that this fancy vocabulary colonizes left-leaning spaces. Nobody wants to sound unsophisticated, so everyone adopts these terms even if they’re not particularly comfortable with them. Like seemingly everything in the internet age, it’s mimetic. And that’s how you get people talking about the role of Latinx intersectionality in queering BIPOC spaces in the Global South.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The Texas Pander Bear

Texas AG Ken Paxton, having dodged conviction in the Texas Senate after impeachment by the Texas House, is tacitly appealing to the Texas GOP base by filing a red-meat lawsuit.

Dump on Trump

On the off chance that one reader is MAGA but persuadable, I shall continue to dump on Trump for the foreseeable future.

Bankrupt Donnie from Queens

Trump’s business—as we New Yorkers always knew—was bilking people. Oh, he had a few slam-dunk construction projects early on, using his daddy’s money. And he did prove himself more competent than the City of New York when it came to completing the Wollman Rink in Central Park. But almost everything else crashed. He declared bankruptcy four times. He stiffed the small contractors who built his casinos. He stiffed his lawyers. The real property developers in New York—no shrinking violets themselves—told jokes about what an egomaniacal phony he was.

Trump only began to make money when he signed on as an actor playing a billionaire in a reality TV series. This enabled him to take the grift to new levels: he sold his name to overseas developers who slapped it on apartment buildings, he sold steaks and wine and bottled water; he used the money to buy golf resorts and a few buildings.

…

Trump is a fraud and also a traitor. He tried to overthrow our government. But he persists, an icon, because he doesn’t “sound like a politician.” Nice work if you can get it. And the Democrats can’t seem to understand that they will make little progress against him if they don’t address the issues that built his brand—the crisis at the Southern Border and the refugees in Northern cities, crime (Target is closing nine stores, including one in Harlem, because of rampaging hordes of shoplifters), the false pomposities of identity politics…and, of course, the fact that Joe Biden seems to be doddering.

Joe Klein, The Art of the Fraudster

Donnie from Queens is boring

Four years into his presidency, Trump isn’t boring in the way a dull, empty afternoon is boring. Trump is boring in the way that the seventh season of a reality-television show is boring: A lot is happening, but there’s nothing to say about it. The president is a man without depths to plumb. What you see is what you get, and what you get is the same mix of venality, solipsism, and racial hatred that has long been obvious. Trump’s abuses of the presidency are often compared to those of Richard Nixon, but Nixon had a deep, if troubled, interior life; one biographer characterized Nixon as struggling with “tragic flaws,” a description hard to imagine any credible biographer using to describe Trump.

Quinta Jurecic, The Tedium of Trump

There’s quite an illustration at the top of Jurecic’s article, too.

Flaunt/Flout

Donald Trump does not flaunt the rules of golf—that is a vicious lie.

He flouts the rules of golf—just as he flouts good taste, common decency, the Constitution, etc.

To flaunt something is to show it off: A rich man might flaunt his wealth, a beautiful woman might flaunt her beauty, one of those younger Kardashians I can’t tell apart might very well flaunt both. To flout something is to disregard it: Rolling Stone writers routinely flout English grammar and usage both.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Lapped by Trump

Poor Mike Pence. For one brief shining moment back in January 2021, standing in marbled majesty, gavel in hand, he did the Right Thing and refused to turn the Republic into a Fiefdom, which caused a mob of knuckleheads to storm the Capitol and send Pence running to an undisclosed location, but he stood tall for Rectitude and Devotion to Duty, and now here he is on the campaign trail making small talk in a Dunkin’ Donut shop with a couple of truckers trying to decide between the Caramel Crème and the Pumpkin Peppermint.

Poor Chris Christie. Once the Emperor’s Boon Companion, now his lone accuser, the former governor does his spiel for a crowd of six Starbucks sales associates on their vaping break who haven’t the ghost of an idea who this porky guy is.

Garrison Keillor

Wordplay

Banned Books Week

a cloying festival of liberal self-aggrandizement

Matthew Walther’s description of Banned Books Week

Confabulation

Confabulation is subtly different than I’d thought. I considered it casual, habitual lying about trivial stuff; apparently, it’s not considered lying at all.

So much for Joe “The Confabulator” Biden.

#Fail

She “sought forms that give shape to the infinite and spiritual dimensions ….”

A poet (Major Jackson) trying to describe the work of a thesophist artist.

The next GOP Vice-Presidency

like taking a job as cleaning lady in the Elephant Pavilion …

Garrison Keillor on Nikki Haley’s prospective Vice-Presidency.

Breaking butterflies on the wheel

breaking every butterfly on a wheel of confrontational rhetoric …

Rod Dreher (hyperlink added)

Jest

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Francis Bacon via Hedgehog Review 24.3, p. 9

Theo

The problem with a theocracy is everyone wants to be Theo

James Dunn via @ChrisJWilson on micro.blog

Philo T. Farnsworth

Tonight Show host Johnny Carson once quipped, “If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Hermit kingdom

Hermit kingdom: a characterization of North Korea in the Economist. It may not be novel, but it had fallen off my radar.

Undecided

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Laurence Peter, via The Economist World in Brief

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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

Dormition/Assumption 2023

As for the headline, IYKYK.

Culture

A lesson from a thick traveler

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

… My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

Chris Arnade, Why you should be a thick traveller

Reflections on living abroad

It’s that mythical place where New World people come to lead different lives. For centuries, and no matter how much it has changed, Europe, for us, has meant art and architecture, science and philosophy, fashion and fame, sex and perfume — and some connection to the past that, in an unbridgeable way, is unavailable to us back home … To come abroad is to understand yourself as a product of your own culture, and to see just how specific that culture is. So much of what I thought of as my personality — whatever made me different from other people — turned out to pale in comparison with what made me similar to other people, especially other Americans.

Benjamin Moser, My Two Decades Living as an American in Europe

Yup.

Reflecting on Moser’s essay, Rod Dreher adds:

I’ve written here about how living in a small country for a length of time has revealed to me how the US throws its weight around in ways that strike me as bullying. Just today The Intercept reports on a secret Pakistani document purporting to reveal US pressure to remove prime minister Imran Khan (who was, in fact, forced from office) to punish him for being neutral towards US policy in Ukraine. That kind of thing really lands when you start to see the world through the eyes of others.

…

I meet young Europeans from time to time who can’t wait to get out of here and move to America, where they can have the fantasy life they imagine they can’t here. I try to dissuade them from their false impressions — its hard, for example, to make them understand how impossible most of the US, outside of a handful of East Coast cities, is to navigate without a car — but in the end, they should follow their dream if they have the opportunity to do so. What I find so interesting is that the thing that draws me to Europe — the weight of its history and culture — is precisely the thing that they want to escape by going to America. Who am I to say they are wrong?

…

[NB]one of these countries can absorb immigrants like America can, because the cultures are way too thick. Any American who thinks that European resistance to mass migration is due to nothing but racism is a fool who ought to have the experience of living here for a time. Assimilation is far, far more difficult here in these thick old cultures than in the thin culture of the United States. America is very different that way; most of the world is like Europe.

Yup again, though one need not live abroad to see the USA as others see it — something I began trying to do in the early 1990s by buying a world band radio when I was too poor (it’s all relative) and busy to travel. One of the blessings of the internet is the ability to get those other perspectives without leaving your armchair. You just need to care to do it.

Too good to last

The students weren’t allowed to take notes. At this stage the experience itself was more important than getting clear ideas and definitions down on paper for later. They had first of all, most of all, to delight and wonder.

…

Despite appearance, however, in their various meditations the professors were gently leading the students toward two goals. First, by pointing out so much beauty, they were bringing students in an experiential way toward the normal trust that the real is really real, delightful, mysterious, interesting—to wonder, as the program’s motto says …

The second goal was to bring students to the recognition that the Western cultural heritage could be a fountain from which to draw and not just a system to be dismantled …

Despite its popularity, a program so unapologetic in its embrace of traditional thought, values, and methods could not but find itself out of step with the priorities, agendas, and specializations of the modern research university. What’s more, in the eyes of administrators, an alarming number of students were converting to Catholicism. Some had even entered the monastic life! According to a summary report from an investigative committee, the program exhibited “a lack of tolerance for divergent points of view.” Through a series of bureaucratic manoeuvres and internal investigations, the program was slowly sidelined in the university curriculum and stripped of resources. Without the university’s support, and amid continuing hostility to its aims and purposes from administrators and professors, the program was shut down in 1979, not ten years after it had begun.

Fr. Francis Bethel, Let Them Be Born in Wonder

Online dangers

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

The risible Washington Post

The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ+ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.

Carl Trueman

Female defect, male defect

Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Well, duh!

Aaron Sibarium, a rising star reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, recently posted, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”

…

To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

… To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise.

David French

I don’t think there’s anything “obscure” or “online” about “no enemies to the right.” It’s been around long enough to have a French equivalent, pas d’ennemis à droite, and I suspect that the English version derived from the French. Moreover, don’t forget pas d’ennemis à gauche.

Unabashed dictionary

Thanks to Jesse Singal, (I Have To Admit I Still Don’t Fully Understand Why You Can’t Change Your Race), I have a new unabashed definition of a progressive:

One who, as of mid-2023, insisted vehemently that an individual cannot change race, which is wholly a fictitious social construct, but can change “gender.”

(This definition expires 12/31/23 if not repudiated sooner by the progressive hive-mind.)

Legalia

Pro tip

I suggest that you skip commentary on the latest Trump indictment (Fulton County, Georgia) for at least 24 hours, to August 16, unless you love being misled by rash hot-takes.

After all, the indictment is very long, factually and legally, complicated, based in part on a state RICO law that differs from Federal RICO and probably from any other state RICO.

We really need a top Georgia criminal lawyer who isn’t on either team in this indictment to suss out the RICO implications in particular, don’t we?

Fraud?

In response to those who say (in response to the latest next-to-latest federal Trump indictment) that “fraud” is limited to situations involving money or property; or who say that, “yes, there are cases holding that “fraud” is broader than that in §371, but we think this Supreme Court has been narrowing broad criminal statutes and we think they’ll narrow “fraud” in §371 if Trump is convicted under it”; I go out on a limb to say:

Lenity and other theories notwithstanding, if the Supreme Court narrows “fraud” under §371, it won’t be in reviewing a conviction of Donald Trump for his January 6 shennanigans. His behavior was just too wicked and the risk to the nation too great.

This is my foray into legal realism. And I don’t say there will be no dissents from upholding the (hypothetical) conviction.

Book bans

I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.

Garrison Keillor

Politics

Telltale

A telltale sign of the dishonest interlocutor is if they oppose your right to question them. Politicians who refuse interviews with the press, public health officials who demonize dissenters, activists who demand the muzzling of opposing opinions—such people are simply not to be trusted.

James Kirchick, Pinkwashing the Thought Police

That Lewis feller was pretty smart, warn’t he?

“You mean you’ve engineered the disturbances?” said Mark.
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Feverstone.
“But–what’s it all for?”
“Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Encryption

Most Times reporters now also rely on some form of encrypted communication, particularly messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp or the emailing service ProtonMail, to keep their sources and conversations confidential.

That is a remarkable shift. Encryption technologies became popular only a few years ago, after the former government security contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of what the United States government was doing to surveil its own citizens.

What We Learned About the Technology That Times Journalists Use.

I’d love to make Signal my default messaging app and Protonmail my default email app, but too few people, inexplicably, have adopted them. (Hint, hint.)

If you say you don’t trust the government but aren’t encrypting your online communications, I don’t believe you.

Subsidiarity in a nutshell

When government takes over a space formerly held by intermediating institutions or citizens acting through the democratic process, they promise dispassionate expertise, neutrality and justice. But what they deliver is a replacement ideology and a big stick to enforce adherence.

William P. Mumma, Chairman of Becket Law.

The politics of Jesus

I was scandalized by this poll graphic …

… until I realized that anyone who answered at all (i.e., accepted the premise that Jesus fits on a political scale) is of dubious sanity regardless of the answer.

I want to add “orthogonal” to my vocabulary, and “Jesus is orthogonal to politics as we conceive them” seems apt.

Postscript

Failure of imagination

The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.

Charles Bowden

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

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Happy August

Culture

Frodo failed

Frodo failed.

If you’re a reader of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (or just a movie-goer), then you know that the central, heroic character, the young Mr. Frodo, ring-bearer, fails to throw the Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom at the end of his arduous journey. Everything he loved, his home, his friends, every scrap of goodness, depended on the Ring being tossed into those fires, and, when it came down to it, he was unable to let it go. Fortunately for Middle Earth, the wraith-like, pitiable creature, Gollum, bit Frodo’s finger off in order to have the Ring again for his own, and accidentally slipped and fell into the fires, saving Middle Earth in the bargain. All of that drama resolved by an accident?

It is genius.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Pedagogy after AI

Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”

If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.

If you take up this challenge you will learn not to “think for yourself” but to think in the company of well-chosen companions, and not to have your thoughts dictated to you by the transnational entity some call surveillance capitalism, which sees you as a resource to exploit and could care less if your personal integrity and independence are destroyed. The technocratic world to which I would be handing you over, if I were to encourage the use of ChatGPT, is driven by the “occupational psychosis” of sociopathy. And I don’t want you to be owned and operated by those Powers. 

Alan Jacobs, Technologies and Trust

Stripping humanity from homo sapiens

If out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, then if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.

L.M. Sacasas, Embrace Your Crookedness. This is a very worthwhile reflection on the human condition.

Don’t assume that “they” will be stripping humanity. Some people strip their own humanity. Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) embeds the story of one who did so:

So with his money he could follow his mania, which was for the new thing, for Science, for the machine, for the artificial, the modern. You may not remember it, for I think it came earlier with you than with us, but there was some time ago a rage for such things. It was partly due to your H. G. Wells and his imitators, and it was partly due to our ideas about America, which we then believed to be entirely covered with sky-scrapers and factories.

…

I went on so, telling more and more absurd stories, until I said, “And of course I was forgetting, there is the artificial woman that was invented by the celebrated surgeon Dr. Martel. That is quite wonderful.” And my old friend said to me, “An artificial woman? What is that? A woman that is artificial! For God’s sake! Tell us all about it!”

…

I saw that she was getting very fond of me, like a mother for her son, and I grieved, for I did not like to have brought this sorrow to her by [the silly joke on her husband about the artificial woman]. I felt very ashamed when she came to see me at a time when the cold wind had made me bad with my lungs, and it was as if I should go like my sister, who had died when she was sixteen, and I said to her, “Aunt, you are too good to me. I have done nothing for you,” and she answered with tears in her eyes, “But you have been as good to me as a son. Do you think I am so simple that I do not know the artificial woman must long ago be finished, with such a clever man as you say working on it? You tell my husband that it is not so only because you know that I could not bear to have such a creature in my house.” There was nothing at all that I could say. I could not confess to her that I had been a monkey without making it plain to her that her husband had been an ass.

…

It came to this poor silly old man and he learned that the most modern thing to do was to kill yourself, and so he did it. He became very melancholy for a time, working at it as other old men work at learning chess, and then went into his stable and hanged himself, to be modern, to have an artificial death instead of a natural. I think he was probably sure that there was immortality, for though he believed he was a freethinker I do not believe it ever crossed his mind that he would not live after death. And soon after his wife also hanged herself, but I do not think there was anything modern about her reasons, they could not have been more ancient.

Whence our delight at athletes?

Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

Hectoring, dismissive and jejune

[I]f the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be. … To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

Christine Emba via DenseDiscovery

Notable passing

SunRay Kelley, Master Builder of the Counterculture, Dies at 71. That link should get you through the Times paywall.

Sinead O’Connor

My cyberfriend Patrick Rhone shares a worthy comment on Sinead O’Connor: some Kris Kristofersson song lyrics in her honor after she was booed off a stage.

Musicians are sometimes prophets, and prophets often get stoned.

Political

Muslim discomfort with Democrat extremists

Asma Uddin, in her book “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” describes “a tacit agreement that Muslims, as religious believers, will never challenge any of the rights championed by the Left, such as a progressive vision of gender or sexual equality.” Muslims became an integral part of the party not as a faith community with distinct theological commitments but as a “marginalized” group requiring protection from Republican bigotry.

…

But during the Trump years, the Democratic Party veered sharply to the left on social and cultural issues. The Republican Party lost interest in Muslims, with Mr. Trump neglecting to antagonize them during his 2020 re-election bid. The new enemy was “wokeness,” and a growing number of Muslims found themselves on the GOP side of that divide. According to the AP VoteCast Survey, as many as 35% of Muslims voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, compared with 8% to 13% in 2016.

…

It’s easy enough for the left to dismiss white evangelical Trump supporters. But when the party does the same to Muslims, who for years had been loyal Democrats, it demonstrates its disrespect for actual cultural diversity.

Shadi Hamid, Muslims vs. Democrats: A Story of Betrayal

Conservatives and Reactionaries

When writers at The Bulwark or The Dispatch, or the presidential campaigns of Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, and Will Hurd, criticize Trump, they highlight (at least in part) his breaks from longstanding norms, traditions, and expectations of elected officials. Trump shouldn’t have lied about the results of the 2020 election. He shouldn’t have provoked an insurrection and haplessly sought to foment a self-coup to remain in power after losing the vote. He shouldn’t have disregarded laws restricting access to classified documents. And so forth. Those are the kinds of objections one would expect to hear from conservatives.

But DeSantis has nothing critical to say about any of the above. When he goes after Trump, it’s for his failure to break more radically from longstanding norms, traditions, and expectation. Trump was too willing to defer to public-health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, too quick to believe vaccines could protect people from becoming ill, too inclined to seek support from LGBT voters, too moderate on abortion, too cautious in dealing with the administrative state. In all of these ways, Trump was too conservative. He maintained too many continuities with the past. He should have broken more fully with it in favor of an alternative future that would be more congenial to the right.

Damon Linker, Ron DeSantis, Reactionary Tryhard.

I don’t want Joe Biden to be President for four more years. I’d gladly vote for most conservative alternatives to him — if there were any. Trump is a reactionary and populist (as well as a narcissist and/or a fine illustration of “oppositional defiant disorder”); DeSantis is trying to outdo him on both counts. And I don’t intend to pull punches about that sad reality.

“Spreading democracy”

My nation pretends it’s spreading democracy, and I’ve never (within ready memory) believed that.

Democratization conflicts with Westernization, and democracy is inherently a parochializing not a cosmopolitanizing process. Politicians in non-Western societies do not win elections by demonstrating how Western they are. Electoral competition instead stimulates them to fashion what they believe will be the most popular appeals, and those are usually ethnic, nationalist, and religious in character.

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

Barbarian feigns Christianity

On twitter Stephen Wolfe, author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” claimed he didn’t know who Emmett Till was until he recently googled his name. He then commented: “Yea I’m supposed to care about some 1955 event that all the libs care about. Their minds are captured.”

…

Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism extolls a fantasy Calvinist confessional state in which the elect rule over the lost and reprobate. God’s reputed people have the power, and the people less favored are their subjects, living under their rules. Its vision of power over service isn’t very Christian. And its subjugation of some people over others based on their religion isn’t very nationalist. It certainly isn’t at all American.

But disdaining Emmett Till’s murder, and the civil rights revolution it helped unleash, as part of the wider ongoing, 2000-year-old Christian revolution of equality and dignity for all, is helpfully clarifying.

Mark Tooley

I can’t think of anyone I consider actually Christian who advocates “Christian Nationalism.” Maybe I need to get out more. Maybe some Christians involuntarily drawn to the notion have conscience-pangs and reservations so they don’t talk about it.

One of the reasons why I oppose “Christian Nationalism” in the USA is that notionally-Christian barbarians would almost certainly grab the reins of power, and there’s nobody more remorseless than someone who thinks he has a mandate from heaven to rule righteously.

Tough love

Congratulations to Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who over the weekend set a standard for good governance to which political leaders throughout the Americas can aspire.
“I wish him luck and strength,” he tweeted after his son Nicolás was hit with charges related to money laundering and drug trafficking. “May these events strengthen his character and let him reflect on his own errors.”

TMD

Public transportation is a loser?

The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don’t charge fares, suddenly it can’t ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.
@dx@social.ridetrans.it

Via DenseDiscovery. I confess that I had to read that twice to see the brilliance.

Unwelcome contrast

I myself am a secret monarchist, as were my relatives in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1775 except they weren’t secret about it. I miss Elizabeth II, the perfect modest model of a modern English monarch, tramping in the rain with her corgis. When Her Majesty met President Schlump and he opened his big yap and hee-hawed at her, we saw a contrast that was not favorable to our side.

Garrison Keillor

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

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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