Category: Culture

Saturday, 7/26/25

Cultural

The cost of convenience

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

Matthew B. Crawford, Defying the Data Priests

The source of some of our sickness

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal, to use living things as if they were machines, to impose scientific (that is, laboratory) exactitude upon living complexities that are ultimately mysterious.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Touching politics

What’s remotely “risible” here?

Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian … believes the Russian [Orthodox] church waded into Africa to spread propaganda and stoke hostility towards the West. The idea is less risible than it may at first seem. The Russian church’s favourite subject—“traditional values” and how the decadent West wants to pervert them—aligns with conservative religious views in Africa, where clerics tend to oppose homosexuality.

The Economist, January 25, 2024.

The idea did not at first seem risible to me, and it still does not.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. had Ambassadors giving the middle finger to traditional lands by flying Pride flags at embassies and marching in gay rights parades (see here and here). Are we so clueless that we don’t recognize that putting lightning-rod sexuality issues front-and-center in our foreign policy makes us vulnerable to adversary countries who aren’t yet out of their minds?

Money Quotes For The Week (excerpted from Andrew Sullivan)

“You know that scene in an action movie when the bad guy runs through the kitchen of a restaurant and pulls down all the pots and pans behind him to slow down his pursuers? We’re in that part of the Trump presidency,” – Jason Kander.

“So lemme get this straight: The Biden Admin (2021-2025) fabricated the Epstein Files before 2019 but did NOT release them before the 2024 election — instead expecting that Trump would demand their release only to do an about-face because Biden in fact made it all up. Got it,” – Daniel Goldman.

…

“People are mocking [Speaker Mike Johnson] but it’s important to realize the moral progress it represents for the GOP: less than 20 years ago the Republicans chose an actual pedophile, Denny Hastert, to be Speaker, whereas Johnson merely is running interference for pedophiles,” – Matt Sitman.

How it ends

The uproar over Jeffrey Epstein increasingly feels more like a simulacrum of a political scandal than an actual scandal.

…

[W]e all, and I do mean all, know how this will end.

Donald Trump is going to let Ghislaine Maxwell out of prison early in exchange for absolving him of wrongdoing related to Epstein.

What will his fans say when he does?

Nick Catoggio

For the record, I did not “know” that. I didn’t even suspect it. I’ve apparently been paying too little attention to the simulacrum.

But now that he mentions it, that denouement seems consistent with Trump’s overall shamelessness and abuse of the pardon power.

More:

I myself theorized four days ago that Team Maxwell had leaked the “bawdy” 2003 letter (allegedly) from Trump to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of pressuring the president to make a deal with her. Lo and behold, today we find that the deputy attorney general wants to meet her. After six months of watching how postliberals operate, we’re all conspiracy theorists now. Take one look at this and try to imagine trusting this administration to behave on the up-and-up.

Events since Catoggio published this have swung me toward thinking he’s right about what’s it the works.

Despite it all, including my contempt for Trump, I would wager a moderate amount that Trump will not be shown to have partaken of Jeffrey Epstein’s adolescent delights. Do you really think the Biden DOJ wouldn’t have at least leaked it if he had (leaks could avoid unmasking Democrat ephebophiles)? (See Andrew Sullivan’s second quote of the week, above.)

I would not wager, though, that Trump didn’t know roughly what Epstein was up to.

Lest you think I’m being pedantic, by the way, I generally make it a point to distinguish ephebophilia from pedophilia because the latter always strikes me as more perverted, less understandable. Dennis Hastert, for instance, was an ephebophile, not a pedophile.

Apology accepted, sir.

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

… I, like many, took a transactional view of Trump. In the middle of a debate, he suddenly announced he had become pro-life (something Rudy Giuliani refused to do in 2008, which derailed his campaign). He also adopted a list of potential judicial nominees that accorded with constitutional conservatism. The author of The Art of the Deal drove the bargain that would take him to an unlikely presidency.

While some conservatives remained never-Trumpers, the rest, including me, made peace with Trump as the alternative to Hillary Clinton in a binary political system. Had we lived in a country with a multiparty system, we would have voted for the Christian Democrats and hoped for a part in a governing coalition, but that option didn’t exist.

Hunter Baker at Public Discourse, 1/21/21 (bold added)

I want to use this occasion to reiterate that I, a never-Trumper, have voted for America’s Christian Democrat party three quadrennia in a row. It is an option.

Unserious people governing an unserious people

Mediaite: Tulsi Gabbard Argues Obama Is Guilty of Treason Because ‘There Has to Be Peaceful Transition of Power’

On The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk asked Gabbard to back up her “fighting words.”

“Can you make the case– can you present the arguments– the best bill you can with unclassified information and public information what makes you believe that this reaches that sort of threshold?” he asked.

Gabbard’s smoking gun? Obama — she claimed — disrupted the peaceful transfer of power.

“When we look at our Democratic Republic, Charlie, our system is built on the foundation of the American people casting their votes for who they want to be in office, to be our president and commander-in-chief.” said Gabbard. “In this system, there has to be a peaceful transfer of power.”

The Morning Dispatch

I’m pleasantly surprised that Charlie Kirk, himself something of a MAGA grifter, would challenge Gabbard on accusing Obama of treason.

I’m not surprised that Mediaite had to state the obvious because Kirk apparently didn’t pursue it:

Neither the Obama administration nor Obama himself ever claimed that Trump did not legitimately win the election. The former president never attempted to obstruct the certification of the election, he never told a news outlet that Clinton was the real winner, and he never encouraged supports to take matters into their own hands and attempt to stop the transition of power.

Gabbard’s boss, however, engaged in all of these actions repeatedly. President Trump claims, to this day, that he won the 2020 election. He actively fought against the certification of election results, and he was impeached for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kirk, Gabbard and Mediaite all leave it to me, though, to point out that Trump “treasonously” interfered with Obama for eight freakin’ years through his birtherism BS. And that Obama has an airtight defense against treason.

And as long as I’m free-associating, what brainworm makes wing-nuts insist that the wives of politicians they don’t like are really men (not that the Macron marriage isn’t a little odd, mind you)?

A unified theory of Trump

Early the evening of the assassination attempt on candidate Trump, Peggy Noonan got a call from:

a friend … from California … He had been very close with Mr. Trump once, and was no longer. He asked my thoughts and I said wow, that was some kind of moment. He said that wasn’t spirit, it’s rage. I quote from memory: “He said ‘fight fight fight’ because he wants everyone fighting, because the game of dominance and defeat is everything to him.” That is him, my friend said, and the fight isn’t for something, it’s just what he likes.

…

In just the past week Mr. Trump accused one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, of treason. Not of a dereliction or mistake but actual treason—betraying his country and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. He told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that, in National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s recent report on Mr. Obama’s actions regarding Russia-gate, “It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason.” “Obama was trying to lead a coup . . . This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

You can say, “He’s just trying to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein problem” and yes, of course he is. But it’s also fight for the fight’s sake, and unthinkingly destructive. Is it good for young people, for instance, to hear one president accuse another of an act so wicked the penalty of conviction is death? It is not good for them.

Before the Journal last week broke the story of the Jeffrey Epstein bawdy birthday book with its letter bearing Mr. Trump’s signature, Mr. Trump threatened “I’m gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.” He filed suit last Friday against the Journal and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo.

An ardent Trump supporter might say, “Good, never let up.” Maybe Mr. Trump says that to himself. But it’s no good for the country for its president to attempt to muscle the press in this way, and it’s no good even for him. If and when the suit goes forward Mr. Trump will be forced to testify under oath on his history with Epstein. There is no way on earth that will be a net positive for him. Which surely he knows. He fights even when he will hurt himself, because the fight is all.

… He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound.

…

Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all.

Peggy Noonan (gift link to one of her gems).

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Tuesday, 7/22/25

L’affaire Coldplay

If there’s a truly compelling reason not to normalize shaming as a global, always-on public spectator sport, it’s not that it degrades the humanity of the shamed; it’s not even the trite “who among us has not canoodled at a Coldplay concert with his sidepiece” justification. It’s simply this: When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.

Kat Rosenfield

Apart from taking joy in distress and ruination, I have no reason to seek out the mêmes and other drollery about the ColdPlay kisscam. This, though, came to me unbidden:

Who’s killing the liberal arts?

An unpleasant truth has emerged in [the University of] Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

Jennifer Frey, This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education

Voting consequentially

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

I met Jessica some years ago at a conference where she was the Protestant keynoter. We spoke a bit because she was teaching at a University that I don’t even bother putting on my resumé despite spending three semesters there in the very late 60s. I dare say her scholarship was an order of magnitude higher than any of the mediocrities teaching when I was there.

Even the one prof to whom I owe a debt of gratitude earned that by a pretty banal observation that just happened to be what I needed at the moment — and I can’t even remember his name because at the time I didn’t realize how consequential that moment would prove to be.

Shorts

  • We’ve been telling kids for 15 years to code. Learn to code, we said. Yeah well, AI is coming for the coders. They’re not coming for the welders. (Mike Rowe)
  • I grew up in San Francisco, walking with my family by the Golden Gate Bridge. I still remember the thick and iconic chain railing that gave the place a sense of distinctiveness. Now the chains are gone, and they’ve been replaced by a soulless metal railing that’s colder than a hospital waiting room. … This is how a culture loses its charm: slowly, quietly. (David Perell).

Quotes via Andrew Sullivan

The convoluted feelings behind the right to be killed

Let us first note that the demand for legal assisted suicide addresses not the legality of killing oneself, but the legality of assisting others to kill themselves. The suicidee (patient? victim?) is secondary. The primary object of the right-to-die movement is the living.

People may kill themselves at any time, without permission or even much pain. Even where it is not legally permitted, suicide, once accomplished, is beyond the reach of legal consequence.

… We must … focus on the desire for someone else to do the killing. Alongside fear of a botched attempt or leaving behind a mess for others, I suggest that the desire for assisted suicide is a perverse expression of the need for recognition. People who wish to kill themselves also want their choice to be socially approved.

… Its advocates say they wish to die with dignity, and then they ask to be euthanized like pets. … [T]he “right” to assisted suicide can only be the right not to be recognized as a human being.

When black Americans were struggling for civil and human rights—for the recognition of their humanity— they arrived at the profound conviction that it was dignified to risk death in that struggle. Assisted suicide represents a perverse inversion: a renunciation of dignity, the demand that one’s humanity go unrecognized. A society that honors that demand will not, in the end, recognize the humanity of anyone.

Matthew Burdette, The Right to Be Killed

From “worst of the worst” to “anybody will do”

Earlier this month, 25-year-old George Retes was arriving for work at a Southern California marijuana farm when federal agents circled his vehicle, broke his window, and sprayed him with tear gas and pepper spray before taking him into custody. Retes, among the more than 360 people to be arrested in the large-scale immigration raid, went on to spend three days in a Los Angeles detention center. 

The problem? Retes is a U.S. citizen and Army veteran, and was not charged with breaking any laws. “I want everyone to know what happened. This doesn’t just affect one person,” he told reporters following his release, sharing plans to sue for wrongful detention. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a veteran or you serve this country. They don’t care. They’re just there to fill a quota.”

…

It’s now been six months since President Donald Trump entered office with a promise to remove “the worst of the worst” from American soil. And indeed, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have shot up as illegal border crossings—and, consequently, detentions by Customs and Border Protection—wane. Yet a significant portion of ICE detainees have no criminal record aside from being in the country illegally, with the Trump administration’s sweeping roundups seemingly targeting individuals on a more or less random basis.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t particularly care if Trump deports everyone who is in the US illegally, though I doubt that any President will do that as long as we want people to do unattractive jobs for “dirt cheap” — including, I suspect, at Trump’s own Casinos and resorts. On the other hand, I’m not eager for him to do it.

What I definitely object to is the apparatus of terror, with masked ICE agents more-or-less indiscriminately grabbing and gassing people who just might help them meet quota. Or even doing that more discriminatingly, come to think of it.

Dreaming of Europe. And waking up.

Whenever I’m down; whenever I’m blue; whenever I think e.e. cummings retired the poet trophy with one poem; especially whenever I wonder whether it’s too late to become a naturalized Frenchman (or Italian, or …); I should by all means remember this: more Europeans die of heat death—largely due to lack of air-conditioning—than Americans die from gunshot wounds. (Factoid via Tyler Cowen)

I’m not so stupid as to think this is the ultimate answer to whether we’re the greatest country in the world. But even if it’s the best argument we’ve got, it’s not nothing.

It was and is ever so

You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.

Ted Gioia, The Ten Warning Signs

Two political items

Jonathan Rauch had Trump 2.0 pegged years in advance

In August, 2022, Jonathan Rauch delineated what would happen if America elected Trump again: We Don’t Have to Speculate About Trump’s Next Term

I thought at the time that he was uncharacteristically shrill, even if he was right. But I came across it again, and he was remarkably accurate.

The (In)Effective Executive

President Donald Trump has a couple of problems when it comes to being an effective executive, the top two being: 1) He is an ignoramus and 2) He insists on surrounding himself with yes-men who are too afraid to tell him that he is an ignoramus.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Politics, 7/21/25

Sanctimony sans self-awareness at Glastonbury

Last point, about how crazy these people are. Jeremy Corbyn, in his remarks from the stage, sent a “message” to Donald Trump, citing this poster seen outside the perimeter fence at the festival. “Build bridges, not walls,” said Corbyn, to Trump:

This poster literally hung on a five-mile fence surrounding the festival! They had to build it so only the people who had paid to come in could enjoy the music. They even had an onsite jail for wall-breachers. But these UK leftists have zero self-awareness. They want the Third World to keep coming by hundreds daily across the Channel, and to be subsidized by British taxpayers. But if any of those illegal migrants wanted to get into the Glasto festival, well, NOOOOO! To jail with you!

Rod Dreher

Why Trump won’t fire him (but may not need to)

Terminating the Fed chair would place him on thin legal ice and bring down an avalanche of criticism that he has destabilized U.S. monetary policy by politicizing the central bank. While hounding Powell out of office wouldn’t solve the second problem, it would solve the first, which is probably why the daily demagoguery is ramping up.

Do we really think Jerome Powell is prepared to endure 10 more months of it, given the sort of threats he and his family are likely receiving from hardcore MAGA cranks as a result? Even if he is, do we think Donald Trump has the patience to endure 10 more months of Powell ignoring his demands to cut rates if and when the economy slides into a tariff-driven slowdown?

There’s no way. We’re talking about a guy who once dashed off an out-of-the-blue memo giving the Pentagon two months’ notice to pull everyone out of Afghanistan.

Nick Catoggio

It is hideous that one must factor hardcore MAGA goons into these calculations.

Demagoguery whiplash

Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!! (Donald Trump Jr in July 2023)

Quotes via Andrew Sullivan

Lonesome Rhodes

Trump always reminded me of Lonesome Rhodes, the charismatic, populist entertainer whose “candid” patter with plain folks garners him enormous power in Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie “A Face in the Crowd.”

At the finale, Andy Griffith’s Rhodes — engorged by flattery and riches — has a narcissistic explosion. Not realizing the woman he betrayed flipped on his microphone, he calls his loyal fans “morons,” “miserable slobs” and “trained seals.”

“I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to ’em for caviar,” he crows, grinning.

Trump’s Truth Social posts backing up Pam Bondi’s claim that the Epstein files were much ado about nothing showed that same brutal disregard for his devout fans. They had taken him seriously? What fools!

Maureen Dowd

I heard an interesting anecdote and a conjecture about Trump from Michael Smerconish, interviewed by Jamie Weinstein on the Dispatch Podcast.

The anecdote: Trump was flying back to NYC from Florida, on a private jet of course. A model on the flight said “why don’t we stop at Atlantic City?” Someone replied “it’s full of white trash.” The first said “What’s white trash?” Trump jumped in: “It’s what I am only I have money.” (I find the anecdote plausible except for the premise that someone on a private jet with Trump didn’t know what “white trash” was.)

Conclusion: Donald Trump trades on being just a regular guy from Queens with lots and lots of money. People like regular guys.

The conjecture: The reason MAGA won’t let go of the Epstein story is that Trump clearly was connected to him and enjoyed his hospitality (to whatever extent, social or venereal), and that kind of hospitality was not extended to normal guys. The whole Epstein nexus (apart from any anti-semitic animus) marks Trump as not-so-normal after all.

Oh, the futility!

Is this really what I’ve chosen to do with my life? Provide running commentary on a conman-charlatan’s attempt to hock his bullshit to millions of morons? Hope that the country can be saved from authoritarianism by equally dishonest right-wing “influencers” stirring up indignation among the moronic masses against the man who more than anyone else taught them how demagoguery is done? Pretend that the Democrats trying their best to sound earnest as they barely contain their glee over Trump’s troubles really care about anything except making the president look as terrible as possible?

The thing that might be worst about trying to focus my attention on political life during the second Trump administration is the continual temptation to respond by a deranged embrace of misanthropy.

Damon Linker, feelin’ a little down.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Sunday, 7/20/25

Divorce, penance, annulment

Roman Catholic apologists have long cited their Church’s ban on divorce and remarriage as commending it and condemning other Churches’ approaches. I have occasionally wondered if they were right.

Such doubts diminished when I began acquiring an Orthodox Christian way of thinking. I heard the somewhat penitential tone of the service for a second marriage. I gained empathy for some of those whose marriages ended, even through their own fault, because we are broken and we do break things. And God doesn’t give up on us when we do.

I also knew that Roman Catholic annulment practice could easily be cast as a (hypocritical) workaround for wealthy Catholics who cared to pursue it (like one of my very attractive law school classmates). I came to prefer the Orthodox practice; briefly:

  • some sort of penance being connected to the Church’s recognition of divorce and,
  • as mentioned earlier, the very service for a second marriage reflecting soberly that a second marriage is a concession to human weakness — “better to marry than to burn with lust”

Then a day or two ago I heard an Orthodox podcast’s treatment of the difference, and decided to dig in a bit deeper.

The Orthodox Church doesn’t give divorces; it penances divorces. Its approach is pastoral. Before remarriage, one must repent of his or her fault in the destruction of the first marriage. This helps those hurt by divorce to be healed and re-integrated into the community and set on the right path again. Since marriage is ordered to the salvation of the spouses, a second marriage is sometimes necessary (“better to marry than to burn with lust”). For a specific, albeit typical, “procedure” for Orthodox second marriages, see here.

The Roman Catholic Church officially does not permit divorce, but has a legal process for declaring, retroactively, that there was never a valid marriage in the first place. Suspecting that the Orthodox podcaster’s characterization of that process and its effects went a bit overboard, I sought out reliable Catholic sources, like here, here, and here.

You can read and judge for yourself (they’re not long), but I find that process described a legal and apologetical dodge with no repentance and spiritual healing for anyone. There’s nothing pastoral about it. In the three sources I consulted, there was only one whiff of examination of conscience about the broken marriage, and even that was in the form of “some people find that simply writing out their testimony helps them to understand what went wrong and why,” not “you really should pause, reflect and repent for your role.”

If the point is to get people into the Kingdom of Heaven, I see a clear winner as between the Orthodox approach and the Roman Catholic. And I’m ready to give as good as I get the next time a Catholic apologist tries the play the divorce card.

Biblical rules

I never hear the [college] administration admit they’re wrong about anything, even though you and I both know they’ve made some bad decisions. Rules get changed every year, but the deans never acknowledge the previous rules were arbitrary—they’re couched in all this talk of biblical principles.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell (Kindle location 3371)

Yancey is very much my contemporary, and I think he was writing professionally before we were 25. Where the Light Fell is autobiographical, and I’m astonished that he retained any sort of Christian faith considering the spiritually abusive environment he grew up in.

The pretense that Christian college policies were from “biblical principles” is one that I knew well and saw through quickly. But it’s a pretext that Biblicists almost have to adopt if they’re going to (a) make rules without (b) appearing arbitrary.

It’s very much with us still. Ross Douthat this week interviews a proponent, one Allie Beth Stuckey, host of an evangelical podcast called “Relatable,” which I guess is a big deal.

For the most part, Ms. Stuckey acquits herself well (Ross is not an interviewer who goes on the attack, like a cross-examiner), but there’s one thing that bothered me. She podcasts on theology, lifestyle, politics, the leftward drift of evangelical leaders and probably other topics. She claims clear guidance from “biblical principles” on all these, and on such things as Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and deportation (which biblical principles predictably support).

And next year, when she changes her mind, it will be from “biblical principles,” too.

It’s false clarity. But the pretext of biblical principles on everything is de rigueur in the Evangelical world.

Most of the time, the earth is flat

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

Jonathan Pageau

Ties that still bind, at least a little

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Quotable

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, via Phil Yancey

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Thursday, 7/17/25

The Main Event

Culture

You’d have to be stupid not to specialize in generalizing

[C]olleges’ pre-professional bent — reflected, too, in some schools’ elimination of such unpopular humanities majors as classics and art history — can be as imprudent as it is unimaginative. The modern job market has a flux and furious metabolism that routinely make a mockery of the best laid plans. “The Computer Science Bubble Is Bursting,” read the headline on an article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch last month. It noted that while the number of computer science majors in the United States had quadrupled between 2005 and 2023, it was now on the decline because of “a grim job outlook for entry-level coders.” “Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words,” Horowitch wrote. “This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.”

So, consulting is the ticket? Not so fast. “If consulting was a stock, I’d be shorting it right now,” the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel told Joe Nocera for an article in The Free Press last week. Its headline: “The Consulting Crash Is Coming.” Its subhead explained that consultants, like coders, are being “outpaced by A.I.”

The moral of those two stories is that the smartest approach to college may be precisely the one that its trajectory of late has conspired against: range widely across subject offerings and focus not on a skill that could become obsolete but on intellectual dexterity and powers of judgment with better odds of enduring relevance. “A liberal arts degree is a pre-professional degree — you just don’t know what the profession is,” said Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar for first-year students at U-Penn called “Why College?”

Frank Bruni

“Learn to code” seemed the veriest wisdom, until suddenly it wasn’t. It has been so my whole lifetime: “We have a shortage of X; therefore, the smart college major is X” has never been very good at assuring that X is a remunerative profession even in the short-term.

Correctionist history

We have a view of the war that emphasizes the decisive American involvement, and with Hollywood’s aid, has become part of our national myth. I do not discount that. My mother had a brother who fought in the Pacific, my dad had three brothers who saw active duty, my father-in-law served, and countless kinsmen of my wife saw combat. But our victory in the West was made possible by the Russians pulverizing the Germans in the East. It was a great victory to us, but to the Russians it was existential. We think that the October Revolution of 1917 defined Russia. It did not, as it did not ultimately “take,” and died the death of all imposed ideologies. But the Great Patriotic War does define modern Russia. Their struggle to protect the Motherland is perhaps one of the most important components that define their national identity.

… Use any metric you want, the Russians far exceeded any of the other Allies.

Terry Cowan. If you doubt Terry, read Anthony Beever’s Stalingrad.

Pronouns

When the poet Andrea Gibson learned two years ago that their ovarian cancer was incurable, the news marked a turning point; Gibson would often say it led to some of the most joyous moments of their life.

Before the terminal prognosis, they were always afraid. They had severe anxiety and chronic panic attacks; they were petrified of the ocean; they couldn’t bring themselves to eat nuts on a plane, in case they turned out to have developed a new allergy and might suffocate in flight. For years, they’d lived in constant fear that everything would come crashing down. Then, of course, it did. And just at the moment when patients are frequently pushed to start “battling” cancer, Gibson finally learned to stop fighting. In an interview last year with the website Freethink, they remembered telling themself: “I will allow this.”

Faith Hill, Andrea Gibson Refused to ‘Battle’ Cancer

I am, I guess, a troglodyte. I cannot help but consider a person with ovarian cancer a woman, whose pronouns therefore are “she” and “her.”

Had I known Faith Hill, I would have tried to use her preferred pronouns in speaking to her as a matter of courtesy. But she’s gone now, and the two quoted post-mortem paragraphs speak for themselves about how awkward and artificial the pronoun thing can be.

Politics

GOP: You Are Dead to Me

JAN. 6 RIOTERS ARE THE NEW HOT EVENT IN TOWN FOR REPUBLICANS
County parties say they want to hear directly from people charged with storming the Capitol; former defendants are eager to recast the narrative

…

The Davis County Republican Party in the Salt Lake City suburbs held its annual Abraham Lincoln Day Dinner in March at $75 a plate. One marquee speaker was a pardoned defendant who federal prosecutors said knocked back a shot of Fireball whiskey in the conference room of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“This was not an insurrection,” the speaker, Treniss Evans, told the crowd. “This was Kent State. This was Tiananmen Square.”

Wall Street Journal

See Mona Charen, Why I’m a Single-Issue Voter, too.

I think what I need to do in response is the presume every Republican supports Trump and the insurrectionists unless they affirmatively show otherwise.

As always, this does not mean that I’ll begin default-voting for Democrats. They just get less of my bile because I had no high hopes that they have shattered.

Legalia – of my former profession and its practitioners

Thinking of the children

I think Skrmetti, Mahmoud, and Free Speech Coalition can be summed up in a meme: Won’t somebody please think of the Children? But more precisely, the Court was protecting children from misguided parents. https://www.youtube.com/embed/q3D8670smTI?feature=oembed

In Free Speech Coalition, the Court allowed the state to protect children from accessing pornography that their parents might wish to access. In Skrmetti, the Court allowed the state to protect children whose parents approved puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And in Mahmoud, the Court allowed parents to protect their children from the school board.

These three cases are not the same, but at bottom, they were all about protecting the children.

Josh Blackman

Integrity

The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies – such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University – has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.

Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.

… Reuters spoke to four former lawyers in the unit and three other people familiar with the departures who said some staffers had grown demoralized and exhausted defending an onslaught of lawsuits against Trump’s administration.

‘Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,’ said one lawyer who left the unit during Trump’s second term. ‘How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?’

Reuters report via Lafayette Journal & Courier.

Adiaphora

I considered cutting these, especially the second, because everyone is talking about Jeffrey Epstein and MAGA bucking the Boss over his attempted denouement.

But I’m publishing the first largely because I share Kevin Williamson’s sense that a certain ink-stained wretch at the Daily Wire is particularly wretched, unreliable, and transgressive of the Ninth Commandment; the second because even on a subject as tired as Epstein’s ephibophilia, Freddie DeBoer is unlikely to write anything outworn; the third because it, too, is about l’affaire Epstein, and you might want to be spared it.

The high cost of low trust

There’s the obvious moral thing, of course, and the specifically religious scandal of a bunch of people who invoke their Christian faith every third sentence publicly taking consecutive high-volume hippopotamus dumps on the Ninth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”) in each of the other two sentences. Watching my conservative-leaning, Trump-supporting, Christian friends, from the Catholics to the evangelicals, try to explain that away, twisting themselves into metaphorical knots that Dante would have done something awful with, fills me with dread. J.D. Vance, who lies about immigrants with comprehensively amoral facility, may be thinking about his place in history, but he should be thinking about his place in eternity.

…

Which brings me to Megan Basham, a dim, boring liar who is nonetheless useful as an example of what politics on the right looks like in our time. Basham, who plays in the right-wing Christian sandbox (you can read my review of her excruciatingly stupid and dishonest Shepherds for Sale here, and I don’t know whose cornflakes I pissed in to keep getting these assignments) recently tweeted this carefully composed casserole of imbecility and insipidity: “We need a new red scare. And a new McCarthy.”

…

McCarthy’s low character did not make it easier to fight Moscow’s agents in the United States—his sodden stupidity and willful dishonesty made it much, much more difficult, a fact for which his enablers bore some responsibility. In our time, the United States needs immigration reform, and consistent enforcement is going to have to be a part of that—and Donald Trump is going to make it a lot harder to get that done. J.D. Vance is going to make it harder to get that done. The clutch of fools around them—Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr.—is going to make it harder, because they have the net effect of undermining trust in government, including those such as Kennedy who are not directly involved in immigration. They do not seem untrustworthy—they are untrustworthy.  Cheerleaders and enablers and turd-polishers great and small, from big noises such as Sean Hannity and Robert Jeffress to little fish such as Megan Basham, are making the kinds of reform they purport to desire harder to achieve, too.

Kevin D. Williamson, The High Cost of Low Trust

Speaking of Megan Basham, this needs to be said about her demonization of George Soros, and Kevin D. Williamson said it better than I could:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

The Epstein Conspiracy Theory

It’s an old saw, but for good reason – conspiracy theories tend to flourish because they are in some strange sense comforting. They create the appearance of order in a universe filled with chaos. If a lone nutcase can kill John F. Kennedy, then there’s a certain inextinguishable randomness to the violence that governs human affairs. But if it was all a conspiracy, one involving the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the mafia and the Freemasons and the Knights Templar and Opus Dei and – if it’s all a vast and magisterial conspiracy, well, then in a deep sense the world is governed by rules. Cruel and unjust rules, maybe, the kind that rob the country of their telegenic leader. But still, there is a logic to that injustice, a cold sort of stepwise purpose. No wonder even a president can be killed, if the most powerful forces in the world were conspiring to end his life! And that’s a lot more comforting, isn’t it? If Lee Harvey Oswald was just some guy with a gun, well… who among us is safe?

… And that’s exactly what I think of when I see all of this fixation on Jeffrey Epstein; it’s a record of our desire to force the most disturbing crime of all to make sense.

Epstein was a true monster and I wish he had not successfully avoided jail, even though he did so through suicide. I’m glad Ghislaine Maxwell will likely die in prison. I don’t doubt that powerful people were involved in their systematic abuse of underage women, and in a perfect world we’d be able to name them, shame them, and prosecute them. I want whatever was true of his death to come to light, and if there was a coverup, I want whoever was involved to face consequences. (But this is the United States so lol.)

Freddie DeBoer

Cui bono?

I haven’t been reading Michelle Goldberg, a progressive New York Times columnist, but recently read some praise for her writing. So despite my low interest in Jeffrey Epstein, I read her Monday musings (gift link) on the disappearance/nonexistence of Epstein’s client list.

I think she’s onto something, especially when she points out the curiosity that “Among those on the right who believe there’s an Epstein cover-up, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself.”

That he, Bondi and all are protecting him was my first thought when they sandbagged us. But not the QAnon-addled Trump-worshippers of MAGA. They thought he was secretly waging war on a cabal of child-molesting Democrat cannibals. (See Michelle Goldberg’s column on that.) That he, a serial-adulterer buddy of Epstein (who once non-judgmentally noted that Jeff “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”) might have enjoyed a bit of facilitated statutory rape himself never occurred to them.

On the same sorry topic, Jonathan Chait has an interesting opener:

Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history.

Bonus

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Saturday, 7/12/25

Miscellany

Intellectual honesty got in the way

Over the weekend, I listened to the six episodes of The Protocol, the new NYT podcast on child sex changes. It’s very helpful to get a chronology of the ideologically-motivated shifts in policy and treatments, and to hear a range of views, pro and con. It was also obvious that the two reporters were super-liberal, and desperately wanted to confirm the benefits of child transition – but intellectual honesty got in the way, as it must. This is a more balanced treatment than anything you will find in, say, the Washington Post.

Well worth a listen.

I was struck by a few things. Both Bowers and Kennedy – trans activists and surgeons – still eagerly deploy the trope that transition is necessary to stop children from killing themselves. They know this isn’t true at this point, and the NYT did not provide the data that shows that trans youth suicide is extremely rare (2 cases among kids denied a sex change out of 1500 in the UK over ten years, for example). That anyone would still be telling parents confronting a kid with acute gender dysphoria that their only choice is between a “live boy” or a “dead girl” is appalling, unethical and untrue. yet the leading trans activists know it’s their best line, and are happy to keep lying if it will help keep them transing children.

Bowers denies that there is any debate to be had at all – “there are not two sides” – and denigrates Hillary Cass as “haughty” and “old,” without addressing her findings. Kennedy argues that child sex changes came about at first so that black trans women would be less vulnerable to being murdered because they would pass better. (I’d suspect the opposite: that passing better as female at first makes the subsequent revelation that they are still biological men that more dangerous.) But the data we actually have suggests that black transwomen have a lower chance of being murdered than an average citizen.

Then there was the refusal of the trans activists even to acknowledge the profound differences between adults and minors. You get the sense that these older trans people are telling children to transition before puberty because they regret not having done so themselves. Again, a form of unethical projection.

The podcast argues that politics and medicine should not be entangled – and imply that the backlash to child sex changes is thereby illegitimate. But the “science” of sex and gender itself originated in postmodern ideology.

One other major lacuna: the podcast never tackles how many kids who have been mistakenly transed are gay and lesbian. The children most vulnerable to this irreversible medical treatment are same-sex attracted, which make the whole subject something that destroys the entire premise of a single LGBTQ+ identity. I understand that this is unsayable in the NYT, but it’s true nonetheless.

Listen to it and make your own mind up. It’s designed to engage liberals who have been accepting of anything any minority activists want. And that’s a good thing. Well-meaning liberals need to be better informed by liberals who actually care about the truth. Whether liberals can break free of the tribal politics that have frozen this medical scandal in place remains an open question. But I doubt it.

Andrew Sullivan

A very brief obituary for a very dubious bishop

I clip obituaries, as well as bios and interesting profiles. For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been systematically editing those old clips.

It may not qualify as an obituary, but Alan Jacobs, an Anglican, had some pointed words upon the death of John Shelby Spong, an apostate who nevertheless (or was it for that reason?) became a Bishop in the Episcopal Church U.S.:

John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.

Ease is the disease

In Bellevue, Washington, [Nick] lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

What Musk’s Grok thinks of Musk’s American Party

My favorite take on our newest political party is this one, brimming with nationalist scorn:

The America Party is Elon Musk’s new third-party push in 2025, born from his beef with Trump, aiming to snag a few key seats and shake up the uniparty. … It’s led by immigrants like Musk (South African) and tech bros pushing H-1B visas for cheap foreign talent over Americans. … [It’s a] power grab to flood tech with imports, under the guise of “innovation.”… It’s just elites gaming the system.

The author? Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed for The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter by its owner, Elon Musk.

Nick Catoggio

Your postliberalism versus ours

To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.

Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?

Rod Dreher, America Votes in a Clash of Postliberalisms, regarding the 2024 Presidential election.

I don’t think reframing the clash as between competing postliberalisms makes the choice clearer because I cannot identify with either postliberalism.

I fear that this really is the choice we typically face now, and I pray that whatever rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born will turn out to be a prince.

But I can’t knowingly vote for it. I refuse to choose.

Scientizing the humanities

The scientific conception of knowledge has become virtually equated with the only way of knowing there is. Not only does it dominate its own offspring, such as the social sciences and anthropology, but it has invaded the classical fields of the humanities, a fact which makes a proper understanding of poetry, for instance, almost inaccessible to the modern student. The degree to which philosophy has capitulated is clear from the extent to which it is preoccupied with such mental gymnastics as logical analysis and even mere information theory.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Thugocracy

ICE: random acts of state terror

ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notes the inevitable result of such spurts:

Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:

I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.

And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.

…

And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:

We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.

But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do.

With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror. And this, we discover, is the point. The whole purpose is to engender so much fear that migrants self-deport and potential migrants never come. The latter is an important tool for border control, as far as Miller is concerned. It’s the new wall.

…

We also have a president unique in our history in his contempt for the rule of law, who abuses the pardon power to empower lawlessness from his subordinates, deploys a rhetoric designed to encourage thuggery among the ICE rank and file, and who makes memes mocking the detained. He and his minions have also now designed a system that will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,* will not target employers, but will fill our streets with a new stormtrooper army and build super-size detention camps — some surrounded by gimmicks like gators or sharks — to generate sufficient state terror to deter anyone from coming to this country.

Andrew Sullivan

(* When Sullivan says the Administration “will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,” he’s referring to the trivial increase in immigration courts compared both to their backlogs and to the huge increase in ICE’s budget.)

Another sign (as if we needed one) that we’re authoritarian now

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book How Democracies Die.

Elisabeth Bumiller

Morality is not a language Trump speaks

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

David Brooks, Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Wednesday, 7/9/25

Culture and stuff

America: Belated July 4 preface

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Yet I am still moved to tell this Fourth of July story. It’s become an act of defiance, because the story is contrary to the prevailing values of 2025 ….

Popehat (Ken White), introducing his annual July 4 post about a 1992 Naturalization Ceremony.

Legalia: Why now?

Will Baude at the Divided Argument blog has some speculation about why it took the Supreme Court so long to rein in universal injunctions issuing from Federal District Courts.

Remembering that it’s speculation, I nevertheless find it fairly convincing, and the answer I find convincing is not that the court is partisan hacks. There’s too much evidence to the contrary, such as conservative justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, along with Justice Kagan, who’ve long said that the injunctions were dubious.

Journalism: Dumbest imaginable editorial

This has got to be one of the dumbest, most perverse uses of Opinion Page space ever: “AI fact-checked Donald Trump and this is what we learned”.

So the Washington Post writers asked major AI sites to opine on the truthfulness of 20 claims by Donald Trump. The AI sites, which learn their stuff from things like digesting newspaper opinion columns, plus the blogs and substacks of bien pensants, gave the answers that the columnist would have written without AI.

Mind you, I don’t disagree with the responses because I’m one of those bien pensants (in this context at least). But I have zero percent greater confidence than before AI reinforced my priors — and a 10% lower opinion of the Washington Post (which dropped its prices so low I couldn’t say “no” any longer) for effectively enlisting pattern engines (that’s what AI is, really) to write a literally mindless column.

Conversion therapy today

After the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, “LGBT” organizations issued statements condemning the court’s decision. I’m gay, and I welcome the court’s decision. So-called gender-affirming is a new form of “conversion therapy.” Instead of “praying away the gay,” we are “transing” it away.

…

When I reached adulthood and began to accept myself as the gay male that I am, I resolved to help create a world where children are told that it’s OK to be an unconventional boy or girl. For a while, I thought we were on the right track. But now, instead of making more space for nonconformity, we’re medicalizing it. Instead of telling kids they’re fine the way they are, we’re saying the opposite: No, it’s not OK to be this way. There is only one way to be a boy and one way to be a girl. You don’t fit. We have to fix you.

Two years ago I interviewed psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 adapted the Dutch protocol for use in the U.S. During that conversation, Ms. Edwards-Leeper used the word “cult” five times to describe what had become of pediatric gender medicine. When I told her about my own childhood, and said I feared that, if I were growing up now, I might have been falsely affirmed as a “trans girl,” she responded, “I’m sure you would have.”

Ben Appel, ‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay

I listened to all of the New York Times podcast “The Protocol,” and read Nicholas Confessore’s long piece in the Times as well. I gained fresh appreciation for the subjective good faith of many youth gender medicine practitioners who I had tended to view as profiteers and limelight-seekers.

But I have not read or heard a mainstream treatment of these fraught transitioning issues in many months that acknowledges the truth of Appel’s title: untransitioned kids with gender dysphoria usually grow out of the dysphoria and end up gay. That’s is a constant premise of Andrew Sullivan writing on trans issues, for instance. I’ve never heard it refuted, and it sure seems relevant.

An example from Sullivan, frustrated at the takeover of his gay and lesbian world and feeling briefly liberated by one of Trump’s Executive Orders on the sexual binary:

Every human being in the entire history of our species produces either sperm or eggs — that is the core truth of our species’ reproductive strategy, and it applies to intersex people too. No sane society should replace this truth with ideology about purely subjective “genders” of which there are now over a hundred (and counting) …

…

But I feel particularly liberated in this moment as a man who has been openly gay before many of these transqueers were born, who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and was front and center in the fight for marriage equality and military service (and thereby loathed by the transqueers). My gay and lesbian world has been captured by gender and “LGBTQIA+” zealots ever since we won marriage equality. They control every aspect of our community with a grip that tolerates no debate or dissent. … Lesbian bars are being shut down by governments just like the old days. But this time, it’s because these lesbians don’t want biological men in their spaces. The left is now doing to gays and lesbians what the far right used to do: police our bars.

The transqueers and their MSM stenographers have renamed us — without any actual debate — as “LGBTQIA+”, deliberately stripping us of our identities as gay men and lesbians, and conflating us with trans people with whom we have almost nothing in common.

Andrew Sullivan.

The AI tell


Source

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

Ted Gioia.

This is why, Gioia postulates, Big Tech (notably Microsoft) is building AI into its products, upping the price, and giving consumers no choice to opt out.

That said, my means and interests led me to Voilà, an AI browser extension, for which I am paying since it saves me quite a lot of time reading articles with intriguing headlines but no substance that I’m really interested in. It’s even more amazing to have it to summarize a YouTube video, which turns a 2+ hour listen into an almost instantaneous outline.

Altruism processed through the left brain

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What are women good for?

Women, it turns out, are for what privileged, powerful men have decided everyone is for: working forty-plus hours per week to make enough money to support a consumerist lifestyle.

Charles Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Almost enough to make me a conspiracy theorist.

The Justice Department contradicted conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.

How? It released a memo saying case files on the sex offender and former financier do not include an incriminating “client list.” It also said Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019.

Why it matters: Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said a client list existed and was “on [her] desk.” Right-wing media personalities lashed out at her on social media yesterday.

Washington Post (italics added)

I thought “Right-wing media personalities” were just grifting about Epstein, but that “Bondi previously said a client list existed and was ‘on [her] desk’” is as good an excuse for a conspiracy theory as any. Too bad I don’t care enough about Epstein to join in the fracas.

Optimal trade-offs

Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic.

…

Most of us (including most pro-choice people, I think) would like to see fewer abortions—ideally none, from my point of view, but see above about why that probably isn’t the optimal number. There are also those among us who prefer anti-abortion policies that are vindictive or extreme because they are vindictive or extreme, irrespective of the practical effect these might have on the incidence of abortion. The more charitable reading of that familiar tendency is that the law is a teacher as well as a judge, communicating shared priorities and expectations, and, as such, a more stringent approach might pay long-term dividends by influencing public attitudes. The less charitable account is that vindictiveness and extremism are emotionally satisfying to the intellectually immature and the emotionally deformed.

Kevin D. Williamson, Clear But False

Politics

Gangster President

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio

Will the Texas GOP nominate a gentleman incumbent or a lout?

If [John] Cornyn is renominated, his reelection would be highly probable, so securing it would not burden the national party. With [Ken] Paxton as its nominee, the Republican Party might have to spend $250 million (Texas’s 20 media markets devour $2 million a week for saturation advertising) to drag him to victory. Even that sum might fail to do so.

Also, every national dollar spent in Texas cannot be spent elsewhere. So, if Texas’s Republicans pick Paxton in the March 3 primary next year, this would improve Democrats’ now-slim hopes for capturing the Senate.

Another dimension to the Cornyn-Paxton contest is aesthetic but has civic importance. Plainly put, Cornyn is a gentleman. This might seem like an eccentric, because anachronistic, consideration. It has, however, contemporary relevance: Any subtraction from the Republican Party’s supply of civility increases the party’s already large quotient of loutishness.

George Will

I try to keep my nose out of other states’ business, but Ken Paxton is irresistibly odious.

Choose one. Is that too much to ask?

On the unsightly sausage-making of the One Big Beautiful Bill majority:

And there were oodles of lib-owning, each example stupider than the last.

On Wednesday, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio announced that he’d had a change of heart about the bill. He had voted against the original House legislation in May, but now planned to support the even worse Senate version. Why? Quote: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.”

J.D. Vance broke the news about another belated convert on Thursday morning as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a lengthy floor speech attacking the legislation. Vance claimed on Twitter that a Republican congressman texted him, “I was undecided on the bill but then I watched Hakeem Jeffries performance and now I’m a firm yes.”

Dumbest of all was Trump flunky Jason Miller, who simplified the stakes of the debate for wary Republicans yesterday. “You can vote with [Donald Trump], or you can vote with the Democrats,” he wrote on X. “If you vote with the Democrats, you’re not voting with the Republicans. Buckle the f— up. It’s a binary choice.

…

“House Conservatives Warn They Can’t Back Senate Bill to Enact Trump’s Agenda,” the New York Times reported on June 24, in a piece written by Catie Edmondson.

The story was accompanied by a photo of—who else?—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas looking pensive. Roy is an old-school Tea Partier, always ready with a quote about the disgust he feels for Congress’ latest indefensible spending splurge. “I would not vote for it as it is,” he said last week of the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As recently as Tuesday, he was posting point-by-point analyses on Twitter explaining why the bill was a nonstarter.

You know where this is going.

…

By Thursday morning his Twitter posts had shifted to explaining how, actually, the Senate bill is a win for conservatives on Medicaid. Hours later, he completed the cave by voting for the legislation.

I don’t fault Chip Roy, a politician, for being a politician. The Republican Party since 2015 is a comprehensive study in political cowardice; it feels churlish to single him out. What I fault him for is persisting in embarrassing ideological peacocking every time a terrible bill, which we all know conservatives are going to roll over for, hits the House floor. You can prioritize good policy or you can prioritize getting reelected: Just choose one and own it. Is that too much to ask?

Nick Catoggio

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history. 

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc. 

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult? 

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to  their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status  seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

SourceAssessment
Leaked DIA ReportStrikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & OfficialsInsist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA StatementConfirms “severe damage” to Iran’s nuclear program, requiring years to rebuild.
David Albright (Independent)Satellite images show ventilation shafts and tunnels hit; centrifuge enrichment effectively destroyed; rebuilding will take a long time.
IAEA Director General“Very significant damage” expected; key question remains about location of enriched uranium.
Olli Heinonen (IAEA former chief inspector)Possibility remains for a small secret enrichment facility; threat persists.

(Summary of Was Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Obliterated’—or Just Set Back a Few Months?).

To some extent, this feels like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Some of the experts are describing impediments to Iran’s bomb development, others how long it would take to rebuild the damaged facilities. Those are not the same question.

Pete Hegseth on the Iran Mission

Everyone with eyes knows this mission was a success! And if you doubt, here are a number of quotes from people brave enough to see what was REALLY there and not just what so-called INTELLIGENCE shows. This is also what I’m like when my loved ones come out of surgery. I don’t need to see the patient. I just want to hear statements from True Patriots about how he’s probably doing. That’s enough for me. If you weren’t FAKE NEWS, it would be enough for you.

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, we are on the historic, unprecedented verge of a thing that we used to have before he tore up the treaty! Where’s the praise? Where’s the adulation?

Alexandra Petri’s Fake News satire of Pete Hegseth’s presser with the fake news after the Iran bombing (bold and hyperlink added).

It seems to me that there’s been too little coverage of (a) the efficacy of the 2015 JCPOA until (b) Trump pulled us out of it in 2018 and the Iran nuclear program shot back up again. Kudos to Petri for alluding to it.

What Bibi got right

Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.

We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.

…

For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose [i.e., the growing threat from Iran]. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.

David Brooks, not a Netanyahu fan. (bold added, shared link)

The Trump Doctrine

The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

Jeffrey Goldberg

This comes as no surprise to me

I have a theory of why Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. I had it even before he bombed them. I even wrote a very brief description of the theory.

But Carlos Lozada scooped me:

There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.

“How’s it playing?”

Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”

Carlos Lozada

Good populism, vicious populism

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

Peter Wehner, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me

We seem to have turned a corner

Dishheads know I’ve been trying to get a grip on the queer and trans extremists who have run amok with the remnants of the gay rights movement these past few years. But as I watched the transqueers respond to the resounding election defeat with unreconstructed defiance, doubling down on gender extremism, and hurting acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and sane trans people, I felt I had no choice but to try to make a noise that could reach further than Substack, and get through the wall of disinformation that the MSM and queer and trans groups have been perpetrating.

I sent the essay to the NYT as a formality, never expecting it to be accepted. But they did. I expected the editing process to be like the woke-checking at New York Magazine, and I’d have to fight for every sentence. But the process, while it certainly wasn’t without its moments (they did try to water it down a lot), and took a good while to get into the paper, was fine. Even better: they allowed me to say my piece and write at length.

So I spent yesterday in a defensive crouch expecting an avalanche of hate and outrage.

Surprise! I’ve been inundated with thanks and encouragement from my fellow gays and lesbians. NYT readers’ comments were overwhelmingly positive — especially the reader-selected ones. I was stopped in the street in Ptown and congratulated, not yelled at. Old friends, major gay donors, mere acquaintances clogged my mailbox to say things along the lines of: THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID THIS AT LAST. Here’s a text I got from a friend:

I’ve had conversations with a dozen friends today about the trans movement and our unquestioning obedience to it, many of whom had never really considered it before at all and were various degrees of horrified. Thank you for helping make this a conversation we can have, it’s helping.

And that is really the goal: to get a conversation started that should have been happening years ago; to tell gay men and lesbians that something truly dangerous is going on they may not know about; to encourage them to look at it more deeply; and to distinguish clearly between these gender extremists and the gay and lesbian rights movement — so we don’t all get tarnished with the intolerance and incoherence of the gender nutters.

It’s a start. All of which is to say: please speak up if you are hesitating. There is far less support for these crazy experiments on kids and ideological extremism than might appear. Face down the bullies. And face up to the facts. And rescue our cause from those who will otherwise destroy it with overreach.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack

Nobody is above the law

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. . . . Observing the limits on judicial authority . . . is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [in dissent] skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” That goes for judges too.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Birth of John the Baptist

So far as I know, we have little or no evidence for when John the Forerunner/Baptist was born, but both Orthodox and Roman Catholics commemorate it on June 24. It’s a big enough deal that my parish had a liturgy for it.

The rest of this post has nothing to do with that.

At Stake in Harvard Grants

Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

GOP 2012 redux

Many have made the point, but it’s nonetheless true: Presidents can now do pretty anything they want in foreign policy without seeking congressional authorization, provided it involves dropping bombs on other countries.

Five months into the second Trump administration, isn’t it astonishing that we have a Republican president: pushing for passage of a budget bill that cuts Medicaid and Medicare; pursuing an immigration policy focused on workplace enforcement, deportation of non-criminals, and the encouragement of “self-deportation”; and a happy John Bolton cheering the bombing of Iran? After a decade of debates about What Trump Means for the Right, we’ve ended up governed by the GOP circa 2012, as if the Trump administration were just the asshole version of the Romney/Ryan administration we were spared by Obama’s successful bid for re-election that year.

Damon Linker

Received financial wisdom

The longer I live, the more I appreciate that we can’t know everything, and that we live our lives mostly on the basis of trust. What we trust depends largely on our milieu (the polite term for “tribe” for present purposes), despite trying to avoid echo chambers.

Several of my social media cyberfriends (see footer) are living quite counterculturally, and one of them introduced me to the Dense Discovery newsletter. I probably give it awfully short shrift most weeks, but today caught my attention and led to something pretty thought-provoking, starting with a graph:

Okay, but let’s talk about the prescribed wealth hoarding model in the United States, otherwise known as prudent financial planning (supposedly). The conventional advice from financial planners is that people of my age are supposed to accumulate something like $1 million in order to retire. Or maybe $1.5 million.1 In case you’re not hip to the logic here – I wasn’t until I married a very specific kind of nerd – we’re supposed to amass so much wealth that we can live off the interest and dividends until we die. It’s not enough to save what we’ll need to make it to the end of our life; we need (ostensibly) way more than that. We need to accumulate so much wealth that we can live off the wealth that our wealth earns. We need – we are told – enough that we never have to touch the principal, and we can pass our wealth along to our next of kin, whoever they may be.2

Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan – by Lisa Sibbett

My father, a professional, seemed to live fairly consistently with the values Lisa Sibbett suggests. My widowed mother had enough and to spare, but their church saw a lot of money over the years, too, and his kids occasionally got gifts at the end of a bountiful year.

My father-in-law, a tradesman, lived the “conventional advice from financial planners,” and we are now benefitting from his success at that model.

I’ve lived somewhere in between those two models. Though I (credulously?) aspired to the “conventional advice” model, I just couldn’t resist living life along the way, and not waiting until I was properly fixed for life. Unlike my parents’ generation, I did not live through any Great Depression and didn’t feel that possibility in my bones. I don’t regret it.

One caveat with Sibbett’s approach is that it requires long-enduring personal bonds. You’ll need to sink roots somewhere, and that somewhere will need to be where others are sinking roots as well. It requires long-enduring personal bonds. It’s not for individualist nomads.

The unmentionable elephant in the room

I confess that I struggled with the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Skrmetti although I reluctantly welcomed the outcome.

I was not alone. Josh Blackman and Hadley Arkes (not a lawyer, but an Amherst professor of Jurisprudence) were in the same position as me, but Arkes in particular pointed to the root problem:

The truth that dares not speak its name here is that this wide array of gender-affirming therapies and surgeries is simply predicated on a falsehood. And yet those are the words that the conservative justices apparently see themselves as barred from speaking. Something in conservative jurisprudence holds them back from appealing to the inescapable and objective truth that lies at the heart of these cases. But without it, what were these accomplished jurists able to explain here? What was their ground of justification in overriding the judgments of those parents who were absorbed in the grief and confusion that seized their children? . . . .

The only “instruction” that would be relevant, Justice Thomas, is the unyielding fact that the child is in a state of confusion: he is not occupying some body apart from his own; his sex was not “assigned” at birth but marked inescapably in the organs of reproduction, in the arrangement of his body. His sex is immutable and printed plainly upon him.

Those were the words that Chief Justice Roberts and five colleagues could not move themselves to speak. Or they thought they were constrained from speaking by a jurisprudence that bars them from invoking truths beyond the text of the Constitution—even on the question of what is a human being, the bearer of rights, and when does that “human person” begin? . . .

Without those points in place, the judgment of the Court simply dissolves into a chain of ipse dixits. Why was it not legitimate for the parents of stricken youngsters to order the procedures that might relieve their “gender dysphoria?” Answer: The legislature of Tennessee did not think it a legitimate medical remedy to choose—even though the children and the parents did not share that judgment and were willing to take their risks. One judgment had to prevail, and it was the judgment backed by the power of the State. To put a high finish on it, that “power” represented the authority of a people to govern itself through elected representatives. But when the people speak through their representatives, and override the judgments of parents about their children, they are still obliged to say something more than “we have brute the power to impose this judgment through brute enactment of the law.”

Arkes singles out Justice Thomas, I suspect, because he said “so-called experts have no license to countermand the ‘wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.’” (Justice Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh.) Arkes’ re-formulation, I guess, is that the legislature can tell the experts “your elaborations are predicated on the falsehood that a person can be inhabiting a body of the wrong sex.”

That’s not the end of the story, but it’s a starting point for re-writing a story written up to now by activists hiding something only a few clicks less deranged than the whack-a-doodle Chase Strangio ideology:

Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be “born with a male body” or “born male”; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. “Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand,” Strangio wrote. “Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.”

My own position hasn’t changed in 39 months. I think we’re still seeing a cultural contagion of trans claims in adolescents and must be very cautious – which is a bit easier now that even Strangio has given up on the “live son or dead daughter” emotional blackmail.

Patience, Mercy, Tolerance

For defenders of political liberalism there is perhaps no more pressing problem than this: How do you make a compelling case for liberalism in an era of ascendant [illiberalism or] strong gods? The idea of “strong gods” comes from the book Return of the Strong Gods by R. R. Reno, editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things.

By “strong gods” Reno means the kind of visceral or agonistic forces that can compel political or social action through deeper existential or even guttural appeals. The strong gods work not by chiefly targeting the intellect, but the appetites.

Michael Reneau, Evan Spear, and Jake Meador, A Virtue-Centric Argument for Political Liberalism (shared link). This article was welcome in light of the ascendance of various illiberalisms.

With a little help from AI, I got this summary table:

VirtueRole Against Postliberalism & Strong GodsRoot/Source
PatienceProvides long-term perspective, allowing growth and changeChristian theology & history
MercyBreaks cycles of retribution, fosters trust and forgivenessScripture, Shakespeare
ToleranceIntellectual humility; suspends harsh judgment; enables coexistenceLiberal philosophy & Scripture (e.g., parable of wheat and tares)

Wordplay

I know every one of these carries political freight, but that’s the burden of many writers these days:

  • Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman remarked on the right-wing ire confronting Patel and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, as they fail to substantiate the accusations that they hurled in their bid for power: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.” (Jeff Lebsack, Buffalo, and Marianne Painter, Tacoma, Wash., among others)
  • In The Financial Times, Edward Luce worried that certain scenes from the Los Angeles protests played into the president’s hands: “Every rock hurled lands like a penny in Trump’s wishing well.” (Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky., and Al Gallo, Huntersville, N.C., among others)
  • In The Washington Post, Philip Bump expressed skepticism about the government’s claim that immigration officers must wear masks for self-protection: “We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” (Patrick Bell, Carmichael, Calif.)
  • Also in The Post, Dana Milbank took in Trump’s pleasure at some sycophantic Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa., and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)

Via Frank Bruni

Ceci n’est pas un phone

Methaphone. Like Methadone. Get it?

In case you’ve been wondering …

No, you’re not imagining it. The main source of political violence in the USA in this century has been right-wing, not left. Jamelle Bouie, Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue:

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century.

I had been wondering, because there has been some leftwing violence against persons, and much against property.

Poor fit

If it seems that America’s colleges and universities are poorly suited to the average American eighteen-year-old, perhaps that’s because they were never designed to serve him.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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