Category: Sport

Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

  • [D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
  • [John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
  • All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
  • River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
  • Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
  • [T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
  • I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
  • “We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
  • He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
  • The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
  • Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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 no-algorithm social medium.

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

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 no-algorithm social medium.

July 1

Times less

I have been asked to weigh in on this several times, but I don’t think I can improve on Evelyn Lamb writing in Scientific American:

There is a phrase, or a type of phrase, that instantly causes me to feel like I’ve stumbled into Wonderland or some other topsy-turvy dream world. “X is n times less than Y” is the basic formulation, where X and Y are quantities that can be compared and n is some number, usually (but not always) a whole number.

Most recently, I encountered it in an article that stated that Spain’s maternal mortality rate is five times less than that of the USA. I don’t want to pick on that article alone, both because I don’t want to trivialize the problem of maternal mortality and because I see similar phrases everywhere. Actual growth of energy demand is three times lower than Duke Energy estimates. Graphene paper is six times lighter than steel. Relative risk ratio for immunological graft rejection is 15 times lower than DSEK (whatever that means). YouTube runs five times slower on Chrome than on Firefox. When I read one of these phrases, I can almost feel my brain rejecting it like an ill-fated transplant, perhaps one that used DSEK instead of an immunological graft.

…

When I first noticed my negative reaction to this type of phrase, I thought I just needed to think through the situations carefully, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my rejection is wholly warranted. Please, stop writing “three times less than” or “six times lighter than” or “twenty times thinner than.” Think of your long-suffering, literal-minded math writer friends and rewrite! “Steel is six times as heavy as graphene paper.” Thank you. Now I can continue my day without a pesky brain reboot.

People get funny about numbers, particularly when trying to communicate relative scale or importance. The desire to write something that sounds dramatic leads the clumsy writer astray. For example, you’ll read about a car collector who “owned more than 28 cars.” More than 28? Like, 29? Or like 2,849,999,431,291, which also is more than 28. Check my English-major theoretical mathematics here, but I think there is a whole infinity of numbers more than 28.

Kevin D. Williamson. And here I thought I was all alone in this pet peeve. I literally don’t know what this “times less” means. If it’s five times less, is the five the numerator of a fraction? That’s called “a fifth,” not “five times less.”

And I could use a fifth of something about now.

Becket Fund

On a happier note, I felt like time another paean to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty:

[T]he Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and its annual Canterbury Medal dinner, [recall] the infamous 12th-century clash between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. Their feud ended with Becket murdered by four knights of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket thus became a martyr for the idea that you don’t render unto Caesar the things that are God’s.

“The constitutional order that Jefferson helped create has sustained a deeper and more diverse religious life than even the Founders themselves anticipated,” says Mark Rienzi, a law professor at Catholic University who serves as president and CEO of Becket.

As galas go, Becket’s is a doozy, with guests sporting kippahs, turbans and zucchettos.

William McGurn, What Real Diversity Looks Like (Wall Street Journal)

I’m pretty passionate about religious liberty, and I put a non-trivial amount of money where my mouth is. All of that money goes to Becket, none to ADF (the Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly Alliance Defense Fund).

I appreciate having gotten some religious liberty (and other) training from ADF, in exchange for which I gave sundry people 450 hours of pro bono legal services over three years. But (caveat: I do not follow ADF obsessively and my impressions may be skewed) it seems to me that ADF is and always was has been a servant of Evangelicalism and its political preoccupations much more broadly than a servant of religious freedom for all.

A visit to their website June 30 tends to confirm that, as it’s clickbaity homepage stories were:

  1. The State of Washington Let Males Wrestle Girls. She Paid the Price. Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted by a male opponent during a girls wrestling match. School officials stayed silent about it for months. Will you give today to help Kallie receive the justice she deserves?
  2. Maryland teacher asks US Supreme Court to review gender policy requiring educators to lie.
  3. School District Coughs Up $95K After Censoring Student’s Charlie Kirk Memorial
  4. Professor Gregory Brown Explains Why Men Shouldn’t Compete in Women’s Sports
  5. He Invited Friends to Pray at Home. An Ohio City Called It an Illegal Synagogue.

Becket’s homepage is (ahem!) a marked contrast.

Becket is unbeaten (13-0) in the Supreme Court; ADF pushes the envelope harder and fails oftener. So far as I can tell superficially (I didn’t click through), I don’t disagree with ADF’s take on any of its featured cases, but my preoccupations are not theirs.

Your mileage may vary.

The limits of choice

I recently asked a waitress at a Paris restaurant for a medium-rare steak. She explained that the kitchen prepared its steaks only rare or medium. I asked politely if the cook could leave the steak on the grill for somewhere between the time it took to make it rare and the time it took to make it medium. She looked at me as though I had asked her to bring me the cow so I could introduce myself.

When it comes to politics, it’s the other way around. In Europe, you will get short shrift if you ask the barista for a nonfat, no-foam, vanilla-flavored double-shot latte. But if you want a similarly tailor-made representative in government, the choice is yours.

You can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between. In Britain—which, as in most things, used to look a bit like America but now seems dysfunctional and weird—there’s a six-way contest: Labour, Conservative, Reform, Green, Liberal Democrat, plus nationalists in Scotland and Wales. That isn’t including those who think it’s time Count Binface or Howling Laud Hope was given his chance.

In America, political choice is binary: R or D. There’s no soy doppio macchiato on the ballot. You can have it black or white. Next customer.

…

Few things could induce me to vote for another four years of the sort of Republicanism we are enduring now. But one of them is definitely the alternative of Islamist-friendly, open-the-borders, defund-the-police, kill-the-billionaires socialists running the country. Out of America’s vast diversity we are somehow at risk of narrowing our choice to that between a rampantly corrupt, inept, ideologically and practically capricious personality cult of a party and a party of graduate student activists with terrorist sympathies and ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.

Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal

I hate sports gambling …

It feels like it has been too long since I petted my peeve about sports betting. Rick Reilly at the Washington Post tees it up for me perfectly since I’d rather have a root canal than watch golf:

the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in golf was on Sunday at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in New York: Bros with a live betting app on their phones, cold White Claws in their hands, tried to can-open his head.

I’ll drop $1,000 on Wyndham Clark to lose and then keep screaming at him until he does.

They heckled him all day, chirped at him, messed with his mind.

“Don’t choke, Wyndham!” they yelled. “The bogeyman’s coming!” they yelled. They rooted for his ball to go into the bunker or the rough or out of bounds. They cheered when his ball trundled off the greens. They yelled at him as he drew the club back. Some of the Jabronis got thrown out for it.

…

An Irish fan living in New York named Desmond McGoldrick posted online about the “horrible behavior” at Shinnecock on Saturday, with an “infestation of young men” who were “betting on players making putts, and when they missed, yelling obscenities at them.”

I’ve been working on a golf book for the past two years, and I can tell you the phone-app wrecking of the sport is getting worse. Jabronis have realized they can’t do anything at an NFL or NBA game to improve their chances of cashing in, but they sure can at a golf tournament, where the traditional cocoon of silence before a shot is just waiting to be trashed.

Heckling from app-wielding bettors is wrecking golf

… And I’m not too crazy about predatory “Prediction Markets”, either

In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket.

In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.  

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000. 

But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Wall Street Journal, They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real

DSA

Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America are surging to victory on the claim that they are proponents of “a government by, for and of the working class” that will wrest power from both “far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats.”

Here’s the problem. Most of the leadership of the D.S.A. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class. Instead, an elite made up of well-educated professionals dominates this insurgency.

The D.S.A.’s agenda, in turn, is packed with policies supported by left-wing liberals, white progressives in particular, but strongly opposed by both white and minority working-class (defined, in pollster shorthand, as non-college-educated) voters.

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times (gift link)

That opening was your mic drop moment, Mr. Edsall. I’m not sure you needed the rest of the column (which I accordingly did not read)

Three readings of the book of JD

Despite being a relatively simple book, [J.D. Vance’s Communion] is susceptible to three distinct readings, none of them particularly Catholic. The first is that Communion is a book animated, despite its author’s conversion, by a particular kind of historical, political Protestantism, the faith of petty kings and princes always eager to bend faith in service of the crown. The second is that it is a book about Christianity as a secular force, a thin gruel of moralizing talk disconnected in all but name from the demands of real faith. The third, and perhaps most likely, is that it is what it plainly is: a book about how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States.

Emmett Rensin, A Reading From the Book of J.D. Vance

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

I can’t quite shake What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?. It’s as if we’re relatively sane in private but we’re living a non-stop troll-a-thon in public, which even extends to the secret “public” of the voting booth.

Housing

Cities have largely lost the power to say yes to construction. To prevent officials from acting against the public interest, we have drained them of the power to act in the public interest. Every decision can be appealed, every complaint must be heard, every objection weighed. We are so committed to fairness that we have lost sight of the unfairness of doing nothing.

Binyamin Appelbaum via Frank Bruni

Shorts

  • … Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest … (Bret Stephens)
  • New York Post: Trump Official Says US Control of Greenland Could Bring Back All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp at Red Lobster (TMD)
  • For at the end of the day, a church’s raison d’etre has to rest on more than just a lusty oaf of a king who couldn’t keep it in his pants. (Terry Cowan, explaining why the worldwide Anglican communion is of little interest to him.)
  • Although it may be true that nostalgia views the past through rose-colored glasses, such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good. (Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic)
  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful)
  • The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
  • An AI use case: remembering the half-remembered, the “I seem to recall” stuff of life. (Tipsy)
  • No one hates like President Trump. He hates expansively, ornately, aerobically. He hates in sprawling speeches in the middle of crowds in the middle of the day. He hates in social media expectorations in lonely moments in the dead of night. Most of Trump’s talents are exaggerated or invented, usually by him. They’re his con. Hate is his core, and he’s an undisputed master at it. (Frank Bruni)
  • When someone reacts to yesterday’s birthright citizenship decision by saying there’s a calculated program of “birthright tourism,” remember they’re the same bastards who said Haitians were stealing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats in Ohio.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I offloaded a lot of Never Trumpery from this edition to elsewhere:

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

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Monday, June 1

I recently used AI to generate a title for a blog post. Today, none of its proffers seemed any better than my anodyne offering.

Sportsball

The greatest threat to ethical hooping, if the discourse is any indication, are the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the weaponized shoulders of their star and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the defending NBA champions have mastered a maximally efficient and spiritually corrosive style of basketball predicated, at least in part, on baiting credulous referees into calling fouls on the opposing team. One way they do this is by flopping, the umbrella term for the parade of pratfalls and head-jerks intended to exaggerate the appearance of defensive contact when shooting. The floppers of yore had the luxury of degrading the sport in an era of less intense scrutiny. Not so with SGA, whose antics have become the cause célèbre of basketball fans everywhere, from the court-side seats in San Antonio, where one Spurs fan was seen brandishing a miniature Academy Award, to the pick-up courts of China, where TikTokers are going viral with videos demonstrating their best SGA imitations.

Why the Oklahoma City Thunder Are a Deserving Villain

I don’t watch the NBA much, but playoffs tend to get my attention. I watched the Thunder win the title last year and didn’t like them. I didn’t like SGA in particular, despite respecting his skills.

So when I saw that San Antonio and OKC were tied at three games each, I watched the end of game seven. I’d say Victor Wembanyama is an upgrade from SGA. Next, I’m keen to see how San Antonio stacks up against the Knicks.

And speaking of the Knicks, Brian Rivel has, over 35 years of his team’s struggles, upgraded his nose-bleed-section Knicks tickets into really choice seats, center-court. Now, he’s got some tough choices to make:

Due to a prior commitment, Rivel will sell his tickets to the Knicks’ first home Finals game. Tickets in his section for that game are going for more than $40,000 on resale markets. Although he plans to attend at least one game in the series with his wife — two, if the series goes to six games — Rivel conceded that the staggering prices might change his calculus. “I could list them at a very high number and get life-changing money, where I could send one of my daughters to college,” he said. “It just all depends on how much somebody is willing to offer for those tickets.”

For a potential game six, which may present a title-clinching scenario for the Knicks, some tickets in Rivel’s section have already been listed in the low six-figures. “I gotta go if there’s a game six, right?” he said, before considering some of the more lucrative scenarios. “Unless somebody offers me $100,000 a ticket. Then I have to make a serious decision.”

Tim Kludt, Knicks Die-hards Wrestle With Attending Finals or Cashing In.

Of course, I would sell those tickets, but then again I never would have bought them in the first place, right?

En masse

The law of group polarization at work

In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalization.

When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the “hyperpower.”

I began with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.

This drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party states or so-called blowout counties, where one side or the other wins presidential elections by 50 points or more.

And what happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization, first applied to political decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.

Create a monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.

If I taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.

It’s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.

…

We have to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is better than the world that was.

David French. I quoted so much I felt obliged to use one of June’s ten gift links for this one.

Plausible deniability

He knew how to dabble in race-baiting without quite ever going full George Wallace. He had the great skill of propounding absurd or evil things and adding “It’s what I’ve heard” or “People are saying,” so that there was always enough room for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to sigh wearily rather than face up to what his words meant.

Eliot A. Cohen, Trump the Genius, Trump the Incompetent, Trump the Bogeyman, writing Trump’s premature epitaph after the 2020 election (which, be it noted, Trump lost).

Gender

How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

Abigail Shrier, How the Gender Fever Finally Broke.

Gender identity is meaningless

Sex therapist Jackie Golob put it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. … Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view, and it seems to me that it gets it about right. But if gender is a feeling, then there are as many genders as there are people—human beings are unique, individualistic, and idiosyncratic in how they understand themselves as members of sexes—and, hence, meaningless: Words that describe everything describe nothing.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Forgotten Word: Sex Why the Discourse on Sex and Gender Is So Toxic

We know so much better now

“[F]or longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.”

Andrew Sullivan, Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It. (2021).

CRT is sooooo 2021! Don’t they know that DEI is the real threat to God, Mom, apple pie, the flag and the 4th of July? (Well, maybe Freedom 250 is the real threat to the 4th of July, but that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.)

Yeah! That’s the ticket! Opposing DEI!

The real “corruption” of SCOTUS

Democrats are free to dislike the Court’s decisions, yet they aren’t helpless. If Democrats abhor gerrymandering, they can argue for a bill to limit how, or how often, states draw House maps. But what really angers Democrats is that the Supreme Court is no longer a second progressive legislature that can impose policies they can’t get through Congress.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Application error: a client-side exception has occurred.

Sorry, guys, but nothing is more important this Fall than breaking this corrupt — no, not Supreme Court — this corrupt MAGAfied Republican Party. I’m not going to let even the threat of court-packing deter me.

Where there is no vision, the people perish

What makes our culture modern is that despite the explicit beliefs by many citizens, our public institutions—education, government, the arts, entertainment, journalism, science and technology, commerce—all function without any necessary direction from any teleological vision. They operate without working toward any purpose beyond material benefit and the maximizing of choices for individuals.

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

Shorts

  • I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould via Maria Popova)
  • In rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires. (Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Friday the 13th

Winter Olympics

We are not the first Americans who have had to wrestle with complex feelings about cheering for our nation in troubled times. In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympics. The towering figure of those games was the African American track and field athlete Jesse Owens. His own life epitomized the tension and potential of the Olympics. He proved that you can represent your country well even when you stand in stark opposition to its laws and the way it treats its people.

Born in my home state of Alabama, the child of sharecroppers, he won four gold medals — a feat that would not be equaled for nearly half a century. His wins served as a repudiation of Nazi myths about “Aryan” supremacy and revealed the power of sport to challenge ideologies that dehumanize, corrupt, and destroy.

And then that symbol of American resistance to Nazism returned home to a segregated United States.

Even though he’d become something of an American symbol, cheering for him, especially if you were African American, did not mean you were cheering all of America, including its legalized second-class citizenship for Black people or the lynchings that still plagued the country.

Owens’s gold medals, instead, challenged the American racist ideology of the time in much the same way he challenged Germany. Jesse didn’t represent what America was; he represented what it might yet be: a nation that values all its citizens and residents.

Esau McCaulley, Team U.S.A. Is Not Team White House

Keeping people ignorant

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Heda Margolius Kovaly and Helen Epstein, Under a Cruel Star

Is the public’s best interests one of those substitutes?

A majority of Americans (57%) express low confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative. This includes 40% who say they have not too much confidence and 17% who say they have none at all. By comparison, 43% of adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists. (Source: pewresearch.org)

John Ellis.

What in the world does it mean for a journalist to “act in the best interests of the public”? That sounds paternalistic to me, as, for example, “protect the public from unpleasant news.”

May I should start a regular section for unintelligible polling questions. I encounter them all the time.

“Gender confirmation” as lobotomy

It has been clear to me for some time that there are many clinicians working in the field of so-called “gender-affirming care” who deserve to lose their licenses, plus a few who deserve to go to prison. Try and forget, for the moment, the social whirlwind that has surrounded this area of medicine—the celebrity endorsements, the glossy TV portrayals, the craven journalists. All served to distract us from what has really been going on.

Think, instead, about what is actually involved in trying to make a person superficially look like a member of the opposite sex. Not only the off-label use of powerful drugs, but also the removal of perfectly healthy breasts and genitals, paired with procedures like colovaginoplasty and phalloplasty that attempt to create new organs out of the wrong tissue, sometimes leading to disastrous complications. Try googling “bottom surgery ruined my life,” and see how many horror stories emerge.

…

It’s easy to look back at the uncritical acceptance of medical wrongdoing in the past and see what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” It seems obvious now that bloodletting and trepanning were acts of idiocy. But the widespread acceptance of “gender-affirming” medicine in our own time ought to cure us of this hubris.

Perhaps the closest historical analog to the emerging scandal around gender medicine is the practice of lobotomy, a type of brain surgery that doctors performed approximately 50,000 times in the U.S., most between 1949 and 1952, with the same goal: to relieve the symptoms of mental illness.

The most important figure in the rise of lobotomy in the U.S. was Walter Freeman, a talented surgeon who came from an esteemed medical family and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. This was an era when that kind of prestige conferred enormous power on doctors, and Freeman pursued his experiments with very little restriction, although plenty of his colleagues voiced concerns. As his biographer Jack El-Hai wrote, “Freeman made it plain that he found such ethical complaints a waste of time.” He refused to be deterred from his humanitarian mission.

…

If our forebears were transfixed by Freeman’s status as an eminent WASP, we have been bewitched by the social-justice messaging around gender-affirming care. We have heard, like Fox Varian’s mother, that if patients aren’t given access to these treatments, they will surely kill themselves. We have heard, too, that a failure to endorse this area of medicine betrays a lack of empathy for suffering patients. Some who raised concerns have been socially ostracized or forced out of their jobs.

Louise Perry

Too full of themselves

The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane. The other day I remembered an old story about Muhammad Ali. The great boxer was flying to a championship bout, feeling on top of the world. As the plane taxied down the runway, a dutiful stewardess kept coming by: “Sir, please fasten your seat belt.” He smiled. “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

Peggy Noonan, A Stiff Drink from the Trump Fire Hose

The duopoly

So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.

American politics is a war of attrition right now. The sooner Democrats learn to live with that fact, the better.

Damon Linker, The left just got crushed (11/4/24)

I don’t think the Democrats have learned to live with that yet. They’ll never say “open borders” out loud, but I think they’ll re-open them again — wide open — if elected again in 2028. And that’s exactly the reason I don’t expect them to win in 2028.

The insanity of this duopoly makes me queasy, yet people keep on eating the sh*t sandwiches.

Shorts

  • There’s a kind of motion that passes for virtue now … We rarely admit how much of our “growth” is merely our ability to change surroundings faster than our interior life can catch us. (Steve Herrmann)
  • The algorithm isn’t a devil, but it disciples the same impulse: never remain long enough for silence to become revelation. (Steve Herrmann)
  • “Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.” Adam Mastroianni via Frank Bruni.
  • Adjusting to retirement: “Am I lost, depressed or quietly content? Do I need to name what I feel or can I simply flow through these shifting states of emptiness and ease, confusion and calm, and call it life?” Mona Leano-Arindaeng via Frank Bruni.
  • If a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs, and there is no quiet. (Prov. 29:9)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Thanksgiving 2025

Sportsball

Surely you don’t read me for sports tips! I’m not even a journeyman sports fan—more like “notional”, as in “I love Premier League soccer” but watching it is always a lower priority than something else.

My only “drop everything” sport is Purdue men’s basketball, and “drop everything” even there is notional in a way. I had a conflicting church service last week and I didn’t even sneak a peak at the ESPN app during the service to see how the game was going.

That said, I have a prediction. Purdue’s consensus All-American point guard, Braden Smith, is not going to continue his scorching pace on assists and will not break the national record. I’m seeing it already.

He’s every bit as good as ever, but he’s surrounded by a deeper team, and they are getting a lot of the assists he might have gotten earlier, most notably when Purdue was the Braden Smith/Zach Edey show.

Big men Trey Kauffman-Renn, Oscar Cluff and Daniel Jacobsen, for instance, are assisting each other (Smith gets it to one of them but he in turn immediately gives it up to another as the defense collapses on him and his teammate moves into the alley-oop zone — for instance). It’s reflected (in its most boring form) in the box scores, where the scoring and assists are both better distributed.

Add to that Omer Mayer, who played some pro ball in Israel before coming to Purdue, and who is getting a lot of playing time as Smith’s designated successor. Sometimes they’re on the court together, but Smith’s getting more mini-rests on the bench this year.

This bodes to take Purdue to a fantastic season and deep into March Madness in part because it will be harder to beat Purdue by keying off Smith or Smith and Kauffman-Renn.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Suppressing the urge

Having established my guy bona fides by rhapsodizing about sportball, I trust I can share a softer story:

[M]y dad was a near model of classic masculinity. He was a superb athlete who had competed for England as a middle-distance runner; he had been captain first of his high school rugby team and then of our town’s. He was taciturn and bloody-minded, threw his weight around in our house, fished in the North Sea, raised rabbits and chickens, and drove fast. He routinely knocked down parts of our little house whenever he felt bored to add extensions, which he rarely finished. His mates drank lots of beer, and it was clear he was much happier among them than with his own family. He even had a mid-life crisis, and bought a racy car and a leather jacket. It was as if he felt the need to act out a near-parody of “toxic masculinity.”

He wasn’t cruel to me, but he never came to any of the school plays I was in, or any of my debating contests. Too girly, I suppose. And of course I felt as if I had let him down. I remember with more than a little poignancy how he once gamely tried to teach me how to kick a soccer ball. And how utterly useless I was.

What he didn’t let himself experience to its fullest for a long time was another side of himself. He loved to draw and to paint. After his death a year ago, we found a letter that showed he had once been admitted to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, perhaps the finest such institution in the country, and a great honor. He never told us of this, and I don’t know why he turned down the place. Probably his need to earn money, but maybe also the price of gender-conformity. But as soon as he retired, and especially after he got divorced, he started painting again — and the results were spectacular. I cannot help but wonder what kind of life he might have had, if he had had the courage of his own, non-conforming desire, what great paintings he might have produced over time.

Andrew Sullivan, Two Sexes, Infinite Genders

SWATting update

As threats escalate against Indiana lawmakers, Braun says his family also targeted • Indiana Capital Chronicle.

As of Friday, the acknowledged count was up to seven incidents.

I’m going to apologize for and retreat from something I wrote earlier, when I attributed this to “Hoosier MAGA ghouls.” I still think MAGA is likely and ghoul is a sure thing, but Hoosier ain’t necessarily so. We don’t yet (I fervently hope we find out and prosecute) know, and I should not have voiced my speculation.

(There’s a long backstory about a time when I was closely adjacent to a group falsely accused by lazy and biased press.)

Think tanks

[A] think tank should be … about ideas. As soon as the purpose becomes advocacy alone, or some other purpose related to gaining money or power, the “think” part is lost. The organization becomes a mere propaganda machine. There is nothing inherently wrong with policy advocacy for its own sake. But an organization that does only that should not be described as a think tank. Nor should its word on policy be trusted. Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.

…

For many years, the Heritage approach was to apply the principles of economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and strong national defense to the task of formulating policies. Today that is no longer the case. The doctrines driving Heritage’s output, as determined by the foundation’s president and the board of trustees, are a combination of Pat Buchanan-esque populism, nationalism, Trumpism, and various strains of what is called postliberalism.

Kim Holmes, To Be or Not to Be a Think Tank

Vaccine update

Bewilderment and doubt are among the anti-vaccine movement’s most powerful weapons. It’s true that doctors cannot say with absolute certainty that some ingredient in some vaccine, or combination of vaccines, does not contribute in some way, however small or large, to the rise in autism diagnoses. We also can’t rule out the possibility that infant vaccines cause tornadoes or bad movies. Uncertainty is inseparable from science.

Benjamin Mazer

Why Tucker is so tragic

I met a Christian friend in London for a pint a few hours before the event. He told me that his American in-laws are normie Boomer conservative Christians who had no idea who Nick Fuentes was, until he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s softball interview. They are big fans of Tucker, and came away from that interview convinced that this Fuentes boy makes a lot of sense. My friend had to try to convince them otherwise. See, this is why Tucker’s normalization of Fuentes through that mushy interview is so dangerous. Had Tucker done a proper interview, it might have been otherwise, but he didn’t, so here we are. Lots and lots of normal conservatives trust Tucker, who was great on Fox. This is why what has happened to him is so tragic — and so potentially dangerous.

Rod Dreher

Bitcoin

Proponents have told me for years that bitcoin is money (it’s not, really), that it’s an inflation hedge (come on, now), or that it’s a haven asset for times of stress (LOL), but it turns out that its most useful function is to serve as an early warning system that markets are unwell. On several occasions of late, it has been a lurch lower in bitcoin that has led a decline in global stocks. It sinks, stocks follow. And it has sunk a lot, down by a third since early October to $84,000 or so. Only another $84,000 to go before it reaches fair value. (Source: ft.com)

Katie Martin via John Ellis News Items

Random Thoughts

  • For what it’s worth, I seem to be thinking more clearly, and I certainly am happier, now that I’ve more-or-less completely resigned myself to living with the consequences of my fellow-citizens’ quadrennial electoral folly.
  • If you don’t predict when the bubble’s bursting, you’re not really a prophet but merely a Eeyore. I’m not a cryptocurrency prophet.

Shorts

  • “More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves—the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.” Kevin D. Williamson, Against Nostalgia
  • “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all,” – Andy McCarthy, conservative lawyer, via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “[I]t’s a movie about how Glinda and Elphaba need to be allowed to feel good about themselves no matter how much harm they do to everyone around them.” Sonny Bunch on Wicked: For Good.
  • “Here’s the brutal truth: no immigrant wants to be here. He’s only here because it’s better than being “there.” That’s the thing about immigration that makes it both sad and scary. Those poor slobs didn’t want to uproot and come here, but things suck so bad back home, they felt like they had to.”(Shocker, Shocker: Foreigners Steal from the United States)
  • “So my poll numbers just went down, but with smart people they’ve gone way up,” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Suspicion of metanarratives, then, means thinking that no one ever gets the Big Story right. But then postmodernists too have a Big Story: that no one ever gets it right.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • “My new all-girl punk band is called Quiet Piggy,” – Anka Radakovich via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Namibian politician Adolf Hitler Uunona is expected to win reelection tomorrow, proving that name recognition really is everything in politics.” (The Morning Dispatch)

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

A corollary of not loading this blog up with anti-Trump stuff is that steam must be let off elsewhere:

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Dateline, Weimar America, 8/28/25

CrackerBarrelGate

This story strikes me as stupid, stupid, stupid. Here, through the voices of others, is why.

The chain was founded in 1969 — not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. Now, the market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been trying to adapt …

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in restaurant signage. We have also confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover that someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.

Megan McArdle

This, too:

The Cracker Barrel farce … is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled. 

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

…

Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

Nick Catoggio.

In a Man-Bites-Dog story, Christopher Rufo recently wrote a little piece that was not knee-jerk shit-stirring! But this episode tells me he hasn’t really mended his ways.

I expect no better from Rufo, frankly, but Hillsdale College has no excuse — and no more respect from me, though I thought very highly of it ten years ago when it was, like I was and am, conservative, not Trumpist. (Two Hillsdale alums, who became expats for a while, were cool on their alma mater well before I was. I guess they read the signs: Hillsdale becoming a caricature of anti-woke education.)

Television rights, National rites

They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television? 

We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

A Swift-Kelce nuptial is bigger than all of that, mainly because of Swift, whose fame is vast and fierce, and if you don’t believe that, try criticizing one of her singles on Reddit sometime. There would be outrageous interest for both a live telecast and repeat viewing—you could do remixes, Taylor’s versions, on and on.

…

I think $500 million. That would be the absolute floor.

Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

My better half wants a televised wedding opposite the State of the Union address, but that would reduce revenues quite a bit.

That is, I suppose it would reduce revenues. Who knows? I didn’t even know that Travis Kelce wasn’t a quarterback.

Nobel Laureate

FBI agents searched the Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office of former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday morning, reportedly as part of an investigation into his potential mishandling of classified documents. Bolton was not charged or detained during the operation. President Donald Trump—who revoked Bolton’s security clearance and Secret Service protection days into his second term—told reporters he had no prior knowledge of the searches but described Bolton, who has been a sharp critic of Trump in recent years, as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy.”

The Morning Dispatch

Congratulations, Mr. Bolton! Being described by Donald Trump as “a real sort of a low life” and “not a smart guy” is like winning a Nobel Prize for Integrity and Rectitude.

UPDATE: Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, or even a truffle: John Bolton Inquiry Eyes Emails Obtained by Foreign Government – The New York Times. So maybe Bolton actually, technically kinda broke a law. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” (Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet secret police chief).

The most miserable habitation in the world

The fundamental structural problem of our government during the Trump administrations is this: our constitution assumed the George Washington was President. It assumed that our high officials would be men of high character, virtuous men. It assumed that of the American people as well.

So John Adams was dead right in this quote, the last sentences of which are fairly well-known:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams, October 11, 1798

This President of the United States is not a virtuous man, but a vicious one. Empowered by shrewd and evil advisors (no more “adults in the room”) and motivated by avarice, ambition, and revenge, he is the whale breaking through the net, pushing the “unitary executive theory” (which wouldn’t be a problem were George Washington President) to the breaking point, turning the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge and now trying to take over the Federal Reserve System – the better to blow a bubble from the bursting of which we may never recover.

I’m not going to resume lamenting what else bothers me about this administration (David French has some of the receipts), but I thought the fundamental problem, though it is not my original insight, might be helpful to pass along.

Do we have any reason to hope that men and women of high virtue will fill the Oval Office and Congress come 2029?

To be a conservative in 2025 …

To be a conservative in 2025 is to be politically homeless—but perhaps not entirely politically friendless.

…

At home, the party of Donald Trump—the party of J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson, not to mention supposed normies such as Mike Pence, et al.—currently is engaged in answering a question I hadn’t thought anyone was asking: “What would national socialism look like if antisemitism were less of a political priority?”

Kevin D. Williamson

Apropos of the first paragraph, the bulk of Williamson’s column is about how liberals-in-the-American-polarity-sense are starting to discover some timeless truths that just might allow conservatives to become allies if not intimates.

On that lone hopeful note, adieu!

Nick Catoggio:

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

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.

Bright Monday (with clouds)

Cultural

Learning

The normative approach to learning draws the analytical after it, whereas the analytical approach repels the normative. The fragmentation of arts and letters into academic disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, religion, social studies, and so forth) answers an analytical need that pushes normative inquiry into the interstices between disciplines. This is the strongest argument for reuniting the arts and letters.

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility

What capitalist society requires

A capitalist society required not just capitalist practices among urban elites, but a demographically widespread social acceptance among Christians of the counter-biblical notion that the good life was the goods life.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Empty gestures

Playing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events has become an empty gesture of patriotism—so empty that, when the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks quietly began skipping the ritual, 13 preseason and regular-season games passed before anyone noticed. On Tuesday, The Athletic reported that the Mavericks had abandoned the national anthem, making them the first team in the recent history of major professional sports to take such a stance. The next day, the National Basketball Association issued a statement declaring that every team must play the song, in accordance with league rules. Inevitably, the Mavericks reversed course.

Why Pro Sports Should Skip the National Anthem

A new, and very revealing, locution

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

MAGA-lite

“Sad to agree [that] the Free Press (for which I had high hopes) has ‘descended into MAGA-lite.’ Yes, PC-SJW-Critical-Woke-Intersectionality is bad, but some perspective, please: Blowing up the international order, sucking up to autocrats, wrecking the world economy, sowing doubt about vaccines, spreading medical quackery, strangling lifesaving foreign aid, pardoning violent rioters, preventing data collection, spewing nonstop lies, & extorting the press, law firms, and universities is worse,” – Steven Pinker.

I haven’t cancelled yet, but it’s getting close. Part of it is the MAGA-lite vibe, but another part is that it’s trying to be too much like a full-blown newspaper, right down to the culture vultures fluff.

On the other hand, it’s not terribly expensive — if one excludes the “cost” of wading through some of it.

My visit to the Xitter

I wanted to communicate something positive to a restaurant chain, and couldn’t find a way to do it other than @ing them on X.com:

@Wendys Your Panko fish sandwich is easily the best in the fast food biz. Could you find in your hearts to have it all year, not just in Lent?

Then I made the mistake of looking around, finding tons of tacit confirmation of Fr. Stephen Freeman’s advice:

Quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.

I’m not going to get more specific than that advice because that would be like the kid at the table who says “Mom! Joey had his eyes open while Dad was praying!”: You can’t fault someone for anti-God politics without arguing about politics.

Political

To see ourselves as others see us

4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)

News Items

Deep American Impulse

Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among the oldest and deepest impulses in American life.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)

To see ourselves as others see us

4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)

News Items

Judicial

Payback Lawfare

Political persecution this, political persecution that: The Trump administration is seeking criminal charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, Trump’s public enemy number one. Federal Housing Finance Agency head William Pulte accused James of mortgage fraud, saying she misrepresented her building to get a better loan deal. He also accused James of claiming a Virginia property as her primary residence while she was New York’s AG in order to secure a lower interest rate on a loan.

You’ll recall that Letitia James literally campaigned for attorney general on a platform of prosecuting Trump on anything she could. Here she was back in 2018: “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions, and that of his family as well.” But now, with the shoe on the other foot, James is accusing Trump of politically persecuting her. Her team said that Trump was weaponizing “the federal government against the rule of law and the Constitution.” Such are the consequences of lawfare: always in litigation, always filing briefs, never settling, never quite winning.

Nellie Bowles

Not mincing words

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.

This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

…

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? {See, e.g., Michelle Stoddart, ‘Homegrowns are Next’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending American ‘Criminals’ to Foreign Prisons, ABC News (Apr. 14, 2025); David Rutz, Trump Open to Sending Violent American Criminals to El Salvador Prisons, Fox News (Apr. 15, 2025).}

And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning.

…

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.

It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Address by the President of the United States (Sept. 24, 1957). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.”

Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, conservative icon Reagan appointee, mincing no words. Via Eugene Volokh.

Article III

Remember, courts cannot solve all of society’s ills. Some problems can only be resolved through the political process.

Josh Blackman.

This is true. Blackman’s Trump-era meta-theme seems to be that federal courts are getting out of their proper constitutional lane trying to solve ills wrought by Velveeta Voldemort.

The reality that the Bill of Rights is deliberately counter-majoritarian doesn’t always mean that the courts can beat back “populist” majoritarian idiocies. In the political process, it has pleased the sovereign will of the American people to well and truly screw the pooch.

On the other hand …

Perhaps the federal courts are incited to action by the pugilistic stance this Administration takes in the lower courts, its demands for impeachment of judges who rule against it, and its murmurs about maybe defying the courts:

Yesterday Justice Alito published a fiery statement explaining his dissent from the Supreme Court’s early Saturday morning order directing the U.S. government “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees [subject to Alien Enemy Act removal] from the United States until further order.”

Alito’s statement highlighted the rushed and unusual nature of the Court’s order. What it neglected to mention was that the Court probably acted so quickly because the U.S. government cannot be trusted to comply in good faith with the Court’s April 7 order that the “AEA detainees must receive notice . . . within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

Jack Goldsmith (bold added)

Bearing witness against Mafia Don

I’m trying to keep our contemptible President out of this blog. If you want to see what I’m reading (and thinking) about him, I’m keeping them here.)

But I’ve got to call attention to his Easter Greeting. (Trigger warning: blasphemy) “Christian” Trumpists take note.

NEW!

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.

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

Halloween 2024

I’ve been relentlessly venting my spleen against one of the two candidates for President of the United States. Today, I will completely spare you vitriol except to offer this link.

There are, however, a few political comments today, along with much else.

The Machine

That’s not a very imaginative title I came up with. R.S. Thomas is a poet whose Collected Later Poems I bought for some reason, though Thomas was not acclaimed like, say, Dylan Thomas, his fellow Welchman. But I’m very fond of many of his poems.

‘The body is mine and the soul is mine’
says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them and there is not peace.
I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.

Excising personhood

Every attempt to implement machine learning will come at the cost of removing features of personhood from the world. Already, the cost of housing in person-scale environments like the neighborhood where Jacobs herself lived—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—has soared beyond the reach of almost everyone, leaving those with more modest means to move to places dominated by highways.

Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

Trusting obliging liars

When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”

I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.

When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.

Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

David French, Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ (unlocked)

Here are French’s four lessons in summary:

  1. Community is more powerful than ideology
  2. We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
  3. Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
  4. Trust is tribal

Problematizing Geography

How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers.
Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school.

NYT

Sweeties, everything is less clear than you learned in school.

A Moral Choice

Valerie Pavilonis gives a shout-out to the American Solidarity Party in the pages of the New York Times (Is There a Moral Choice for Catholic Voters?) (unlocked).

The imperfection she cites — questioning no-fault divorce — is just fine with me, by the way. I know the arguments that sold no-fault to America, but I also know the reality, and I don’t like it. No-fault deserves to be questioned.

Frivolous pursuits

“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon. In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. I read 1984 long before I read Brave New World. Who in their right mind thinks Orwell saw the future more clearly than Huxley?

Brides of the State

Fifty percent of married women vote Republican, and 45% vote Democratic, which mirrors the GOP advantage in other demographic groups. But, according to Pew, “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” In 1980, the number of women over 40 who had never married was around 6%. Now it is 22%, and this has become a crucial bloc for the Democrats.

Matthew Crawford, Brides of the State

A Conservative Case Against Trump

Bret Stephens makes A Conservative Case Against Trump (unlocked). It’s not his best anti-Trump case, in my opinion, but you can judge its persuasiveness for yourself if you like, since the end of the month is nigh and I have unlocked articles to give away still.

An Academic’s Case for Trump

The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.

Heather Heying, discussing one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, voting for Trump.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

A Grim Anniversary

Three days in a row! When did I last blog three days in a row?!

I have nothing to say about Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, hostages and any piece I’ve left out, but I’m not oblivious to this anniversary.

Not politics

Tradition

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy

Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Sportsball

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

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Dreaming is just about our only break from rationalism

Ted Gioia asks Are Visionary Artists Mentally Ill?. I can’t do justice to it without plagiarism, but here’s a sample:

The whole evolution of music as an academic discipline tends to destroy the most important reason to care about music in the first place.

Here’s one of my charts on the subject:

That’s why I started to write about sleeping.

No music writer talks about sleep more than me. And that’s because dreams happen when we sleep—and this is the one type of visionary experience everybody can still access.

We all become a little unhinged and crazy in those dreams. Even the most rationalistic STEM advocate.

…

Could something like this—dream therapy for creatives— exist in the current day?

I wondered about this for a long time. I finally decided to ask musicians about whether they had learned songs from their dreams.

Nothing prepared me for the response I got. I heard from hundreds of musicians—and learned that the gift of a song during a dream is quite common. And it’s usually a powerful song.

…

I note that many musicians have told me that they are reluctant to discuss their dream songs. The subject is just too strange and antithetical to our dominant rationalist paradigm.

And that reluctance is even greater if the artist has a hallucination or out-of-body experience or something else that ‘medical experts’ might want to treat.

My hunch is that these happen frequently to intensely creative people—even in an age of rationalism.

The world isn’t as neat and rigorously logical as you’ve been told. And the world of artistic inspiration is the least logical of all. There’s a good reason why the ancients believed that creative works were a gift from the muse.

…

I continue to research this subject, and I think about it all the time. Even more important, I try to open up my mind to realms of experience beyond the empirical. That’s where creativity comes from, and I don’t want to shut myself off from the source because of close-mindedness.

Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us.

I can’t think of a solo-effort Substack that delivers more bang for the buck that Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker. And the guy is really smart about some things that interest me.

From the Department of Free-Association: Has Rod Dreher, once again, seized the moment to shape a coming conversation, as he did in Crunchy Cons, Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies?

Politics

Serious people earnestly disagreeing

Back in August I was watching the DNC with my old mom in California. Kamala and Tim and Michelle and Barack and all the others kept talking about our reasons for aiding Ukraine in its fight against the Russian occupation of its eastern territories. They consistently appealed to the apparently essentialized fact that the Ukrainians, like the Americans, “love freedom”, and that it is only natural and right to help other peoples who share this love with us. There was zero acknowledgment of the complexities of geopolitics and historical legacies, or of the situated perspective a Russian might non-crazily come to have, according to which parts of what is now Ukraine seem naturally and justly to fall more into the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire than of the North Atlantic one.

I know a lovely man in his 60s, an outstanding member of the vanishing breed of the Homo Sovieticus, whose father is Ukrainian and whose mother is Russian, and who grew up in Kazakhstan. He tells me his parents waited to get married so that the celebration would take place on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement, in which the Cossack Hetmanate in control of much of Ukraine made a ceremonial pledge of loyalty to Moscow. This friend of mine is in exile, and is no admirer of Putin. He greatly regrets the 2022 invasion. But he could never make any sense of any claim to the effect that Ukraine rightly belongs to NATO and not to Russia in virtue of some mysterious essential trait of the Ukrainian people, that they “love freedom” while the Russians do not.

…

And here we arrive at what really gets me about the Democrats. If we are going to risk direct conflict with another nuclear-armed superpower, let us not be lulled into it by bullshit and platitudes. Why do the Democrats have to talk that way? It’s as if the Republican tactic of portraying “the libs” as effeminate hyper-woke safe-spacers has really only caused the Democrats themselves to double down with absurd displays of hawkish masculinity. We’re supposed to love Kamala because she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and that therefore corrects for the slip-ups of the past years when some in the progressive wing of the party have suggested, on the contrary, that all cops are bastards. Tim Walz, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen primarily because he wears flannel shirts, and has been put on display in the most implausibly kayfabe campaign ads purportedly fixing his own pick-up truck. One almost expects them next to come out with an ad depicting Walz in the act of dressing a deer, looking every bit the caricature of the Minneapolis goy neighbor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). He’s a hunter and a football coach, but he’s also a faculty advisor for the LGBTQIA+ club! What a model of enlightened masculinity! She’s a prosecutor and a foreign-policy hawk, but she’s a she and she brings “joy”! The problem is that none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.

JSR, Founding Editor of the Hinternet, explaining why he wouldn’t join the Hinternet endorsement of Kamala Harris.

What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in? … Trump, in a second term as president, is practically guaranteed to assume the role of overseer of American imperial retreat, in favor not of a global community of equals such as some naïve progressives might have hoped for in the early years of the League of Nations, but of nationalist isolation and at most pragmatic cooperation with other self-sequestering nation-states, somewhat along the lines of what Marine Le Pen envisions for Europe in the phrase “association des nations libres”. That phrase might sound innocent enough, but nations that are free to dispense with any idea of reciprocal obligations are unlikely to remain in a stable “association” for long, and Trump, at least, hardly gives any indications of knowing how to guide the ship of state as it weathers the inevitable storms that will whip up unstable waters in our years of decline. Far better, far surer, we believe, to have a party in power that understands and accepts the nature of the that power: imperial power, namely, which might aspire in the years ahead not only to face off with steely resolve in our current global showdown, but, eventually, to emerge as its undisputed champion.
…
Most of us on the Editorial Board, even the Americans among us, do not live in the United States, and from our respective vantages it is pretty hard to concentrate on any aspect of American political life that does not have to do with its role as a globe-spanning empire. Just manage your domestic affairs however you see fit, we are tempted to say; our overwhelming concern is with what you get up to beyond your borders. We therefore have rather little patience for that current of Democratic partisan discourse that would like for American politics to sound more or less like, say, Danish politics. Denmark, if we may be blunt, and all of the Scandinavian countries with such high marks on all the usual tests, is able to focus on maintaining its robust welfare state primarily because its defense is entirely outsourced to the American Empire. The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.

We would like to see this arrangement continue, at least for now, at least until NATO can be expanded to include all of those states that currently set themselves up in opposition to it, a prospect even Russia’s own leaders in the early post-Soviet years were able to entertain with some seriousness.

You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely “joking” when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter. You might well imagine your are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire. That’s the bargain. We here at The Hinternet, minus our Founding Editor, believe this is a bargain worth accepting, but that is only because we believe it is the United States under Democratic leadership that offers us the single best shot at subduing all the planet’s lingering zones of discontent, and delivering us into a future of perpetual peace. This is what we at The Hinternet want. Do you?

The remainder of the Hinternet Editorial Board.

These seem to be serious people having a serious disagreement, not just swapping bullshit and platitudes. It’s a habit most of us, myself included, could benefit by emulating.

Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy

Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.

Nick Catoggio

(I wonder how Lisa Beamer feels about Flight 93 as a recurring political trope?)

Those conservative Democrats!

The truth, I think, is that the Democratic Party is drifting. Coasting. Dems are buoyed at the national level by Trump’s personal unpopularity but lacking in any kind of compelling vision for the future of the country. For the third cycle in a row, the Democrats have been freed up to run a mostly substanceless campaign that boils down to “Vote for us so Trump will lose.” But what besides that promise of negation does the party stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? Or does it just want to be empowered to manage for a little longer the well-functioning system of domestic and international institutions that already exists?

The answer, it would seem, is the latter. From what I can tell, the Democrats are proposing little beyond a defense of the status quo (or, in the case of abortion rights, a return to the status quo as of a few years ago) against all the unorthodox things their opponents aim to accomplish (including mass deportations, a revolution in how the executive branch is staffed, and the imposition of sweeping tariffs).

That means the Democrats have inadvertently become America’s conservative party, championing the views and interests of those Americans who are content with the country’s present and recent past. When that stance is combined with opposition to the widely loathed Trump, it can (just barely) deliver victory …

The term “conservative” has many meanings, but the most elementary one—the one associated with the man generally considered to be the first conservative writer and thinker, Edmund Burke—grows out of the name itself: To be conservative is to seek to conserve the present’s inheritance from the past: the accomplishments, authoritative institutions, norms, habits, policies, and traditions that have been handed down to us by previous generations.

That’s the meaning of Liz Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket late last week. It’s not a signal that Harris will govern as a Republican from the era when Cheney’s father (who has also endorsed Harris) served as George W. Bush’s vice president. It’s an expression of Burkean conservatism against the disruptive-revolutionary impulses of the MAGA movement.

Damon Linker

What is he talking about?

The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

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

I was not a very good student of history, but I wonder what historic precedents Huntington has in mind when he says “History shows …”. Sincere question. Surely it’s not just that nobody has tried a multicivilizational nation before; that would not yield a verdict of history.

Please comment if you know. (Comments are moderated but not censored for viewpoint.)

We knew damn well he was a snake …

before we took him in.

I love editorial cartoons, and am fond of comic strips as well. As newspapers are dying, I mainline mine from here.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Saturday, 8/10/24

Not much today, but some of it will be pretty stale later.

“Ultraconservative”

He bucks convention in more ways than one: He holds ultraconservative views that are farther to the right than most Americans …

Kayla Dwyer, Indianapolis Star, profiling Pastor Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s surprise GOP candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

What does the phrase “ultraconservative” mean except “further to the right” than most?

I don’t like the Beckwith candidacy, which instantiates a populist Christianist strategy (by sectarian kooks, to boot) to take over my former party. But the press bias still bothers me.

The Olympic Women’s Boxing Controversy

Jesse Singal, If Your Brain Doesn’t Hurt Sometimes, You’re Doing It Wrong

Singal’s title is just about perfect:

[T]here will be a loser. Either Khelif and Lin would be barred from competing as women, or the women who face them will be forced to face down what is, in effect, male competition.

In favor of Khelif and Lin:

  • Disorder of Sexual Development
  • internal testes
  • assigned female at birth
  • raised as girls

Against Khelif and Lin: they have experienced male puberty.

Is your brain hurting yet? There’s no obvious answer, is there?

The Iconic Lunacy quote

Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump, on Truth Social:

What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!

Via The Morning Dispatch

For what it’s worth, I clipped this before everybody else was citing it as the clearest proof yet that Trump is a lunatic.

The case for Harris/Walz

I think the case for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can be summed up in a line. When one candidate on the ballot has tried to stage a coup and the other hasn’t, you choose the latter. Period.

But if that’s not enough to persuade you, there’s a second reason that David didn’t mention. After eight exhausting years, it would be wonderful not to have to worry day-to-day about the president’s mental health.

…

As we sit here in 2024, the last time Americans didn’t need to worry whether the commander in chief might suffer a breakdown of one sort or another was the last year of Barack Obama’s second term.

Nick Catoggio

I still won’t vote for either major-party Presidential slate, but Nick’s not wrong.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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