Category: Technology

Thursday, 12/18/25

Quietly grassing up the neighbor

Of the Bondi Beach terrorist shootings by Muslim men Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram (unconfirmed by police at this writing) and the heroic intervention of one Ahmed al-Ahmed:

Let it be said, and said with firmness and gratitude, that a Muslim fruit seller named Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed one of the gunmen and disarmed him, saving Jewish lives and taking a couple of bullets himself for his trouble. May God bless that brave man. Here is video of him courageously tackling the gunman. This brings to mind something I was told back in 2002 by a Jewish friend who worked in counterterrorism. Be careful not to accuse every Muslim, she said. Some of our best sources are Muslims within Muslim communities who hate what they’re seeing, but know that if they speak out publicly against it, they will be killed. So they come to us quietly.

Rod Dreher

I wish we could figure out what makes many Muslims exemplary citizens, others murderous fanatics. Though I reject Islam as a false religion, I don’t want to think it’s simply that the former don’t take it seriously.

I have a theory, but it’s at a high enough level of generality that it’s not much use, I fear: that Islam, like Evangelicalism, has no authority beyond a sacred text, so Imams/Preachers can twist the text as they wish, limited only by what their congregants will tolerate.

The Other Terrorists

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Nicholas Kristof, The Lawbreakers Trump Loves (August 29, 2020)

AI moves fast, breaks things

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch

Grievance Memoirs

Political memoirs tend to fall into recognizable categories.

There is the sanitized precampaign memoir, gauzy life stories mixed with vague policy projects and odes to American goodness. There is the postcampaign memoir, usually by the losers, assessing the strategy and sifting through the wreckage. There are memoirs by up and comers who dream of joining the arena and by aging politicos rewriting their careers once more before the obits start to land. There are memoirs by former staff members who realize that proximity to power gives them a good story and memoirs by journalists who chronicle power so closely that they imagine themselves its protagonists.

But a recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir. In their books, Eric Trump (“Under Siege”), Karine Jean-Pierre (“Independent”) and Olivia Nuzzi (“American Canto”) are all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies, obsessed with “the narrative” over the facts and oblivious to their complicity in the conditions they decry.

The authors (a third child embracing on to his father’s legal and political grudges, a former White House press secretary groping for a new brand, a boutique political journalist enmeshed in a self-made scandal) are animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces. They are ancillary characters inflating themselves into victims, heroes, even symbols. It is the inevitable memoir style for a moment when everyone feels resentful, oppressed, overlooked — in a word, aggrieved.

Carlos Lozado (who’s famous among his New York Times colleagues as a voracious book-reader).

Add to Lozado’s list a longish article by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine, which Rod Dreher found “one of the most powerful essays I’ve read all year.” Its gist seems to be that straight, white, young men can’t catch a break any more – for reasons predating AI.

Ross Douthat thinks Savage has a point; that Douthat has an opinion suggests that Dreher isn’t just playing Chicken Little again.

I’m fortunate to be chronologically beyond gathering personal straight white male grievance anecdotes (and that my grandson is thrilled at, not resigned to, the prospect of a sort of Shop Class As Soulcraft career).

Are we the baddies?

Remizov and other conservative democrats complain that modern Western liberalism is in fact anti-democratic, as it tramples on national traditions and subordinates national authorities to international ones and to the impersonal forces of globalization.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism. This book is pretty good at giving the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

When your only tool is anger, every little problem looks infuriating

Trump has never shined in moments that call for dignity and restraint … This is what makes Trump’s post about the Reiners not just despicable and cruel but also bad for the country. In moments of national mourning or trauma, a president can seek to bring people together … But not Trump. He finds the most divisive way to insert himself … His choices … take moments that could be unifying—surely Americans of all political views can agree on the greatness of When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride—and turn them into opportunities for anger.

Which is, in effect, Trump’s political project.

David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder

Shorts

  • I like ebooks because nobody can tell that I’m performative reading. (@restlesslens on micro.blog)
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • Insofar is not the same as inasmuch, and I don’t know why the current style is to break the former into three words.
  • I remember mocking people for thinking the Covid vaccine was Bill Gates’ way of getting microchips into us. Hmmm.
  • This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal. (Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch)
  • If “TDS” is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner. (David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder.
  • A tool always implies at least one small story[:] There is a situation; something needs doing. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • After this awful weekend, Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president. (The Free Press, Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. (Advice given to incoming women at Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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.

Lazarus Saturday

Today, we commemorate Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Essentially, I’m now in an eight-day marathon until Pascha/Easter — serving at least two services daily.

Miscellany

FWIW

There was a time when I’d have devoured an article like Best Wireless Headphones (2025): Tested Over Many Hours | WIRED.

Now I think “why bother; what I’ve got is amazing, and quite good enough even if it’s not ‘best’.”

What is the point of being a Republican senator?

“What is the point of being a Republican senator?” one of my editors asked this morning.

It was a rhetorical question.

The remark was inspired by news that former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu won’t run for Democrat Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate seat next year …

No thanks, Sununu said Tuesday. “It’s not for me,” he explained in an interview. “I talked to the White House this morning. I talked to Tim Scott [the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee]. Thanked him for all their support and confidence. But I don’t have to be the candidate, and I’m not going to be the candidate.”

“I don’t have to be the candidate” is interesting phrasing. It’s what you’d say when refusing an unwelcome burden ….

Nick Catoggio

Nellie Bowles excerpts

  • Chiming in on the factory work fetish is—who else?—former gay-turned-antigay Milo Yiannopoulos: “Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again. Making things, in the image and likeness of God the Maker.” Let me tell you: The image of God is not in the microscopic iPhone screw you’ll be mastering until your eyes burn out, Milo. Installing airbags until your elbows give out is—well, that one’s maybe in His image.
  • [Trump tariff advisor Peter] Navarro’s books have often cited an economist named Ron Vara, who is entirely made up. It’s just an imaginary friend Navarro uses in arguments, created through an anagram of his last name. So he earned his nickname [Peter Retarrdo].
  • Mississippi now has the best standardized test scores for fourth graders, when adjusted for demographics (i.e., taking into account socioeconomic status, native language, race, whether your parents raised you to have enough self-esteem, ate enough broccoli, etc.). The rise follows a 2013 decision to use phonics-based learning statewide and to hold back third graders who failed to pass a reading test, which may seem mean until you realize that blue states are letting entirely illiterate kids graduate into the world, a world that—for now—still requires literacy. Meanwhile, Oregon, whose fourth graders have the lowest demographically adjusted test scores, has paused the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement until at least 2029 and is, of course, obsessed with the Lucy Calkins school of teaching kids reading with vibes. Sigh. The real tragedy is that these kids will never be able to read my columns. Luckily for them, I will read it out loud!
  • During a lowkey argument over lawn chairs at a track meet, a teenager named Karmelo Anthony allegedly stabbed Austin Metcalf in the heart, killing him. Within days, both 17-year-olds had fundraisers opened in their names. Karmelo’s has raised $330,000, keeping a rough pace with the victim’s. The moment has turned into a race war, with people donating as if these were two teams in some cosmic battle. As if supporting one or the other is part of racial pride. It’s very scary ….
  • Anderson Cooper, leading a town hall with Bernie Sanders, got chastised for using she/her pronouns for a completely normal-looking woman, with a completely normal-woman name of Grace. Called upon by Cooper, she snaps: “I use they/them pronouns actually, thank you,” clearly annoyed, clearly relishing the moment. Then she starts her question, which is about why men aren’t compelled by the Dems anymore, and no, I’m not kidding: “Polling and turnout data indicate that men of all racial demographics are turning away from the Democratic Party. . . ” Yes, it is a great mystery, Grace, they/them. I’m obsessed with Bernie’s face as this is unfolding:
  • John Oliver dedicated his entire show to a monologue about how there are no differences between men and women in athletics, and transwomen should be able to compete against natal females. “Bigger and stronger bodies are not automatically advantaged in every scenario. . . we have no research about how being trans or undergoing gender-affirming treatment impacts athletic performance in teens.” Which is sort of like saying we have absolutely no research indicating that a giraffe is bigger than a goldfish—no double-blind peer-reviewed studies have been done to date, so really, how can you say which is bigger? …

Nellie Bowles

Speaking of John Oliver

Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard – snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious – that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.

Freddie DeBoer

Over/Under

I’ve been puzzling over the term “over/under,” which increasingly seems to be one of the two numbers reported in sports stories where I’m looking for a straightforward prediction of who wins and by how many points.

Since I do not bet on sporting events, I never bothered to try to figure out the term. But the increasingly it is appearing as shorthand in political reporting, e.g.:

One Dispatch colleague told me he’d set the over/under on how many Senate Republicans would vote to convict in the scenario I described at 1.5—and that he’d take the under.

Nick Catoggio

So I finally took the trouble to look it up. You can, too, if you’d like.

It’s not a useless way to express a prediction, but I really hate gambling terminology, becoming obligatory for political discourse. Nick’s Dispatch colleague could have said “I don’t think Senate Republicans could get more than one vote.”

Not so much about Trump as about DC

In a recent members-only Dispatch conversation, Steve Hayes argued that Trump enjoys nothing as much as the exercise of power, and I disagreed with him: It seems to me that Trump does not at all enjoy the actual exercise of power, which is very difficult and demanding work of precisely the sort that he has spent a lifetime avoiding. The counterintuitive fact is that one of the big problems in Washington is that almost nobody enjoys the actual exercise of power, which is why the three branches of government keep trying to hand responsibilities off to each other: from our drama-queen president to our do-nothing Congress to the tortured pseudo-institutionalism of the chief justice, we have a government run by a team of Bizzaro World Kobe Bryants—guys who only know how to pass and never take a shot. Trump wields power in Washington in approximately the way a man playing Macbeth wields power in Scotland. In Trump’s case—which is our case—the damage is real, of course, but that is no more an actual exercise of political power than a drunk crashing his Buick into a school bus is an example of motorsport.

Kevin D. Williamson

Five Current U.S. Protestant Political Outlooks

[MAGA Christianity] is nostalgic for America’s past but not necessarily for America’s founding constitutional principles, which can impair its ambitions.

Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.

Strongly agree. More:

It mostly hat tips to traditional Christian views about abortion and marriage but is willing to subordinate those stances to wider political ambitions. With the rest of MAGA, it is skeptical if not hostile to American international commitments and to free trade. It’s also impatient with the humanitarian values of the old Religious Right, which it sometimes disdains as signs of weakness if not wokeness. Pentecostal preacher Paul White Cain, the White House faith advisor sometimes associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, is a leading figure. But many others who were conventional Religious Right have aligned with MAGA Christianity. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA is a leading cheerleader.

The overall story was about “Five Current U.S. Protestant Political Outlooks.” The other four are:

  1. Religious Left
  2. Religious Right
  3. neo-Anabaptist left
  4. TheoBro right

I find all five options unpalatable. There’s no paywall, so take a look for yourself.

Let’s us three make a deal

Strikingly, … some of the shrewdest officials and analysts in such capitals as Beijing, Brussels and Washington are focused on a challenge to the established world order that is harder to see or hear. To them, the most disruptive force in geopolitics today is Mr Trump’s apparent desire to huddle with other world leaders, and quietly carve up the world together.

The Economist, The dangers of Donald Trump’s instinct for dealmaking

Trump 2.0

For the good of my soul, I’ve got to stop paying so much attention to Donald Trump.

(That paragraph replaces several paragraphs of TMI.)

Due Process

Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.

Lawrence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky

I have been reminded several times lately that this doesn’t quite tell the entire story.

Many of the people swept up and shipped to El Salvador did have their day in court: in ordinary procedures under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, where they were adjudicated deportable. Instead of self-deporting, they remained in the US where nobody got around to deporting them until someone quite suddenly did with lots of fanfare.

Others indeed had no day in court, but were swept up dubiously under the Foreign Enemies Act and summarily deported. They are fairly described by Tribe and Chemerinsky. Moreover, without due process we have no reason to trust that they were deportable at all.

None of this is to defend the prison conditions to which any of the deportees are being subjected and for which we are paying.

Chris Krebs

Lost yesterday amid the public jubilation over being liberated from “Liberation Day” was the signing of two new executive orders, one aimed at Chris Krebs, the other at Miles Taylor.

Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term, placing him in charge of, among other things, detecting and preventing any tampering with America’s election technology. The president fired him on November 17, 2020 not for doing his job poorly but for doing it honestly and well. Krebs insisted repeatedly after Election Day that there had been no security breaches involved in Joe Biden’s victory. That qualified as insubordination in the Trump White House.

…

Trump’s new memorandum on Krebs accuses him of various offenses, including “censoring” conservative viewpoints, but the true nature of his grievance is right there in the text: “Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”

That’s nakedly retaliatory, just like the executive orders targeting law firms that caused legal trouble for the president in the past. Once again, Trump’s corruption is right out in the open. But I believe this is the first time he’s gone as far as to officially penalize someone for rejecting his conspiratorial nonsense about the 2020 election, a position shared by a large majority of the American public and even by some of his own Cabinet nominees. Or former nominees, anyway.

Nick Catoggio

And if he had said there were security breeches, he’s be saying he’d failed at his job.

Dare I suggest that you cannot win working for Donald Trump?

We should have seen this coming

I highly recommend David Brooks’ Article in the Atlantic, I Should Have Seen This Coming

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Pre-Olympic notebook dump

Public Affairs

Everybody wants everything

Quite recently, I quoted Zaid Jilani:

In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

I responded that perhaps my rejection of the duopoly is because I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive” politically.

I stand by that, and I’m now reinforced by Isaiah Berlin via Alan Jacobs. Berlin:

[I]t is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.

Jacobs adds:

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both! 

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything.

If you are fearful about condemning yourself “to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men,” David Brooks has some help to offer: Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms

America’s world mission

After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration imposed “super sanctions,” promising that such measures would bring the Russian economy to its knees. These measures, and the confidence with which they were imposed, reflected the old consensus, which presupposed the end-of-history dream world. But the outcomes contradict that fantasy. Countries commanding nearly half of global GDP refused to join our sanctions regime, exposing the obvious fact that the “rules-based international order” is not international and never has been. It has always been an instrument of American power.

I’m reluctant to use the word “empire.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States did not establish colonies. But the term has become unavoidable. The international order was made in our image, an ersatz empire, as recent events have revealed. Faced with the prospect of Russian aggression, the demilitarized nations of Europe are forced to operate as American vassal states.

…

I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I venture to guess that the combined military firepower of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and its proxies) is substantial, perhaps equal to any force that the United States and its allies can bring to bear on short notice. How is it that we have allowed such a coalition to emerge? The Journal reports this expert opinion: “Russia and the other nations have set aside historic frictions to collectively counter what they regard as a U.S.-dominated global system.” I marvel at the formulation, “what they regard.” In effect, our policymakers suggest that the Russia-China-Iran-North Korea alliance rests on a misconception. Putin and Xi need to wake up to the truth. The “global system” is not U.S. dominated but U.S. sponsored—for the sake of world peace, prosperity, and the triumph of abortion and gay rights . . . er, human rights. It is nothing so narrow and parochial as the imposition of America’s national interests or our activist ideologies.

Maybe the Great and the Good in Washington recognize reality, and they mouth the old pieties out of habit; or perhaps they sense (accurately) the political danger of being the first to break with established orthodoxies. Can you imagine the domestic furor that would be visited upon a Secretary of State who suggested (again, accurately) that a foreign policy promoting gay rights and other progressive causes is a virtue-signaling luxury we can’t afford in an era of great-power competition? But I worry that we are led by true believers. Some imagine that the United States has been ordained by God to defend “democracy.” Others think that we have a secular mission to promote “reproductive freedom” and LGBTQ rights around the world (the arc of history, and so on).

R.R. Reno

Blaming the messenger

In 2023 Christopher Rufo exposed the fact that Texas Children’s Hospital was maiming minors in the service of transgender ideology. The Texas Legislature passed a bill prohibiting transgender medical procedures for minors. Now Rufo reports that the Texas Children’s Hospital has persisted in practicing “gender-affirming care,” committing Medicaid fraud in order to fund the prohibited procedures (“The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine,” City Journal). Federal officials have not stood idle. As the controversy became public in 2023, they were “busy assembling information.” The target? The whistleblowers! “A federal prosecutor, Tina Ansari, threatened the original whistleblower [Eithan] Haim with prosecution.” Then, in early June, “the stakes intensified. Three heavily armed federal agents knocked on Haim’s door and gave him a summons. According to the documents, he had been indicted on four felony counts of violating medical privacy laws. If convicted, Haim faces the possibility of ten years in federal prison.” A sadly familiar story. The rule of law turned into an ideological weapon.

R.R. Reno

Trade-offs

Writing for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle explored the questions posed by the CrowdStrike IT meltdown. “It’s quite efficient for one firm to serve a large number of important customers, as CrowdStrike does,” she wrote. “In some ways, these concentrated players might provide greater reliability, because they develop a lot of expertise by serving many users, and they can invest more in R&D and security than Bob’s Friendly Local Software Co. can. But when outages happen, they happen to seemingly everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving users no alternatives. How best to try to manage the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy is a hard question for another day. For the moment, the important thing is to recognize that it exists, and that there’s no easy way around it. We probably should have thought more about such trade-offs when the Great Efficiency Drive was underway. We’ll have to think even harder about them now.”

The Morning Dispatch

Model collapse

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise, “things will always, provably, go wrong”. he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI. (Source: nature.com)

John Ellis News Items

Luxury Beliefs

Young Rob Henderson has been deservedly dining out on his memoir Troubled and his coinage of “luxury beliefs.” But once you enter public debates, you not only attract crazies and trolls, but solid critics as well.

Yasha Mounk finds Henderson’s definition of luxury beliefs wanting:

Ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. There is this kind of element of duplicity, whether conscious or not.

He offers a substitute:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

The differences aren’t just semantic, and between the two of them, I agree with Mounk.

Now I await Mounk’s critics to further refine the definition.

Partisan politics

The Populist id weighs in on Harris

I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this, but Nick Catoggio has some pointed thoughts on GOP reactions to de facto Democrat nominee Kamala Harris:

I don’t believe the jabs about her being a “DEI hire” are part of a strategic calculus. I think they’re a matter of the populist id flaring at the thought of being governed by a black woman who’s not part of the ideological tribe.

It’s a preview of the next four years if Kamala Harris figures out a way to beat Trump this fall, I suspect. Unlike any presidency in my lifetime, her term would be wracked by obstruction, paralysis, and public disillusionment.

If you thought congressional Republicans were reluctant to compromise with Barack Obama, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Gaslighted about the border

Remember when Joe Biden made Kamala Harris his border czar? Well, bunky, that’s no longer operative. All the cool kids agree that it never happened. Do you want to be know for cooties? C’mon, man!

At this stage of things, perhaps it’s not surprising that reporters aren’t scrutinizing Harris’s record with the same zeal with which they dove into “Russiagate,” but this marks a new low. We told you she was this thing that we’re now telling you she never was. What’s the word for that again? Right. Gaslighting.

…

We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating “The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.”

Peter Savodnik, Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar’

I understood — indeed, sympathized with — the desperation to keep Trump from the Presidency in 2016. But a lie is a lie, and they’re lying to us again.

It’s not that “they must think we’re stupid.” They do think that we’re stupid, and we give them grounds to think that day after day.

Is this half-apology better than none?

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

…

My judgment of colleagues and of various conservatives who opposed Trump was privately severe. On the surface, I fully granted the strength of their concerns. But in the confines of my mind, I concluded that they were moral free riders. They wouldn’t sully themselves by voting for Donald Trump, but they would benefit from many of his policies. I have been asked why I voted for him when I live in Tennessee where my vote was not necessary. I voted for him exactly because of my determination not to be a free rider. I would bear the weight of the decision.

…

I knew I was wrong as January 6 approached and the president started calling for Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the electoral college results. This, of course, was on top of his disturbing phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State urging him to “find” additional votes. At the same time, he encouraged Americans to mass at the Capitol to support his cause.

I do not suggest that the Americans who went to the Capitol, the great majority of them peaceful, bore ill intent, but I do think that the president intended to create a spectacle that would put pressure on Mike Pence to take a dramatic and extra-legal step that would fundamentally betray the American political order and its traditions.

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

This column is ever-so-timely again. I say that not to praise the de facto Democrat nominee, nor even to imply that she’s a “lesser evil.” I say it, first, as a call to repentance from the behavior that got us into this awful mess. Insanity, by one pop-definition, is doing what you’ve always done and expecting a different result.

For me, part of repentance is rejecting “lesser-of-two-evils” voting calculus. Two parties of some sort were (inadvertently?) in our national DNA from the start; if one must win a majority (not plurality) of electors to gain the Presidency, then third parties are overwhelmingly “spoilers” (though not quite inevitably). I nevertheless will spoil my heart out again this quadrennium — taking care not to despise those who make the “binary” choice.

For any Christian Trump voter in 2024 (I suspect Baker will be in that camp in a few months unless he’s changed a lot since 1/21/21, when his apology was dated) whose head or heart is not dead must extend a bit of grace to those who can’t bring themselves to vote for him.

Trump as media favorite

Be at remembered that the media gave Donald Trump so much Free Press in 2016 that they virtually elected him. And while they clearly wanted to be coded as anti-Trump (their “stated preference”), the attention they gave him smells like revealed preference to me. A lot of people do like to watch him — a preference I never understood from the day a friend of mine went gaga over The Art of the Deal.

Adiaphora

Dinosaur

I like technology. I was, for my generation, an early adopter of computers and I spend (too) many hours per day on my MacBook.

But after a few years on Facebook, I dropped it. I got on it to communicate among my high school classmates, but most of them weren’t on it. And it got kind of overwhelmed with commercialism. Maybe there were plugins or something to suppress all that, but I dropped it anyway.

I dropped my Twitter account, too, unable to bear a 1/100 signal-to-noise ratio. I eventually signed up again, for some incomprehensible reason, only to find that the ratio is now 1/10000. I haven’t logged on in months. Is there any more enervating activity in the world than doom-scrolling?

I thought those were two pretty solid decisions. But now I constantly hear things on podcasts like “You can find it on our Facebook page.” (Oof! No I cannot! Why don’t you have a page on the open web?) And yesterday, the President of the United States announced on Twitter/X that he’s ending his campaign for re-election. (Mercifully, professional doomscrollers quickly surface major news like this.)

I still think those were solid decisions, but they seem pretty tame compared friends flirting with stuff like this and repeating mêmes like “be the friction you want to see in the world.”

A blast from the Covid past

I am radically testing the limits of what it fundamentally means to be outdoors by erecting walls, putting a roof on top of those walls, and then insisting that it is still outdoors. This bold subversion of commonly accepted norms challenges and deconstructs “outdoorsness” as we know it. Moreover, by performing this act of deconstruction through a literal act of construction, I am illuminating the contradictory double nature of the mere act of existing. To this end, I search for the strange within the familiar, the indoors within the outdoors, the technically compliant within the clearly unsafe.

Simon Henriques, I Am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement

Why resign on August 20?

After half a century in politics, Senator Bob Menendez, found guilty of all 16 counts in his corruption trial, will resign, effective August 20. Why then? Well, as Katherine Tully-McManus notes, senators get paid on the 5th and 20th of each month. Trust old “Gold Bar Bob” to check out after payday. (Politico)

The Free Press

Technology will never end work (at least until we re-jigger our mimesis)

Futurists and their ilk keep predicting the elimination of work by technology, but it never arrives. By some reckonings, we’re working more than ever; we’re certainly not approaching zero work, not even asymptotically.

What gives? We give. We keep working because we want more. We want everything. (See Alan Jacobs, above)

Disciples of René Girard make careers out of analyzing such things, so I’ll dabbling lest I make a fool of myself.

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.

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

The Say Hey Kid was that rarity who played a boy’s game with a boy’s joy and a man’s discipline and shrewdness.

National Review, The Week. That’s got to be the best “in a nutshell” on Mays. One consolation of being 75 most of this year is the memory of Willie Mays playing live, not just on highlight reels. You kids have no idea ….

Even the secularists have rituals

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

I became an “Apple guy” at home before retirement, though I still had to use Windows at work. Now our house is all Apple (or nearly so). (I confess to brief side-eyed looks at Linux, but it’s never stuck; I’ve just got my Apple gear set up to do what I want, quickly, so why change?)

Still, VisionPro was a bridge or two too far — way too much money for a novelty. Now:

Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025. (Source: theinformation.com)

Via John Ellis

Freud

In his fanciful narrative, religion and the civilization that springs from it are reducible to a primordial event of psychosexual violence. … For Freud, at the dawn of human civilization a group of brothers, desiring sexual gratification with their mother, spontaneously rise up against their father and commit parricide. They then devour his body in a ritual act, joining incest to cannibalism. Because of their guilt, however, they internalize their absent father’s authority, which takes the place of a collective superego. From that moment on, human civilization has worked to suppress the libidinal will to power in men by repressing desire and transferring it to more “sublimated” activities. All religions—but especially Christianity with its doctrine of God the Father—are compensations for this primordial act of parricide. They can all be traced back to this scientifically formulated (and completely theoretical) act of original sin.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

His polemical broadsides vaulted him to the forefront of a group of revisionist skeptics loosely known as the Freud bashers.

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

Obituary for Frederick Crews: “A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.”

It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materially discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

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

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

Recent dustups over the supposedly racist implications of advocating marriage, thrift, and a good work ethic reveal the logic of cultural deregulation. The goal is to strip society of norms, leaving unsheltered those who cannot afford to live in well-appointed enclaves that covertly sustain modified bourgeois norms for the rich and their children. In the open culture, the lives of ordinary people become more disordered and less functional.

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

[I]t has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”

…

[U]nlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.

…

[I]t’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

So it is that the gendered nature of the body is under attack, from the Left and Right, as is the connection between sex and babies. Left and Right alike resent the limitations of the human body. There’s just one small problem: sex does make babies and men and women are different. An ideology that cannot make room for the basic facts of human reproduction and sex differences is an ideology that will end up at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race. In that war, it will go looking for allies where it can find them. It finds its most powerful, its indispensable, ally in the State.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

By quoting, I’m not endorsing this book. I read it in preparation for a Symposium where the author was to be one of three keynote speakers. Based partly on the book, which did make a few points in a temperate register, I decided not to register for the symposium.

Self-delegitimation

As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

WordPress unfortunately has been “improving” things again, so I cannot figure out how to embed a YouTube video, but I recommend the video at this link.

Theory 1: Putin is a revanchist, with many screws loose, who wants to rebuild the USSR in toto.
Theory 2: Putin would not tolerate NATO being extended to its very border with Ukraine (which the US promised it would not allow), kinda like our Monroe Doctrine.

Expats

“I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

…

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come ….

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

One thing I think we can rule out right away is that the drop in support for same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality is a function of religion. I’m aware of no evidence that the United States is undergoing a religious Great Awakening, at least when it comes institutional forms of worship handed down from the past. As sociologist Samuel Perry recently put it in a useful summary for Time magazine:

According to data from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.

Why, then, might Republicans have begun turning against same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality in the past two years?

This is just speculation, but I’d wager it has something to do with the way left-wing activists have taken up the cause of transgender rights as the next front in the now-decades-long cultural revolution. To be clear: I don’t think such a backlash, if there’s been one, has arisen over calls to protect the civil rights of the tiny number of transgender people in the country. Rather, the backlash would come from opposition to the ideology of transgenderism promulgated by the most militant activists on the left—and the extraordinary rapidity with which that ideology’s assumptions and assertions have come to be treated as conventional wisdom among many of those who run government bureaucracies, public and private schools and universities, medical institutions, and the business sector.

…

If I’m right that declining support for same-sex marriage and homosexual acceptance among Republicans derives (at least in part) from a backlash against transgender activism, that would likely mean that more conservative-minded Americans have concluded the gay-rights movement was a Trojan Horse for something far more extreme and destabilizing. It’s not inevitable that they would conclude this, since as Andrew Sullivan and other champions of gay rights have persuasively argued, the interests of homosexuals stand in considerable tension with those asserted by the most radical transgender activists. But the Activist and Donor Complex on the left has made it natural for the rest of the country to make the leap from one to the other by bundling the two movements together in an ever-expanding, alphabet-soup abbreviation: LGBTTTIQA+, etc.

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

…

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

…

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. It changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to “Hatewatch,” and began issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC’s blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don’t exist, or are harmless (such as a Confederate memorabilia shop that made the list), or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC’s lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson … The SPLC’s appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million.

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

I personally know progressives who are absolutely furious that GOP figures don’t speak out against Trump, but those same individuals are petrified of the intolerant elements of their own political tribe. They wouldn’t dream of speaking against the most-woke elements of the radical left. After all, their jobs are at stake. Their reputations hang in the balance. Remember the now-famous Vox essay, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”? I’ve heard that sentiment many times.

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

If the sudden prospect of electing the first president who is a convicted felon hasn’t put Americans off Trump, why would Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, or anyone else think that reminding them of his coup plot and the insurrection it led to will do so?

On the other hand, how can one run against Donald Trump and not make his authoritarian ambitions the centerpiece of the campaign? He’s not shy about expressing those ambitions; should he win in November, the next four years will in fact be defined by his attempts to subvert the constitutional order. The right’s hostility to Western liberalism is the elephant in the room of this election. How can the president resist making a spectacle of it?

I think his and Donilon’s strategy of making the race about democracy is simultaneously weak and quite possibly the strongest one available to them.

…

There’s another case for the Donilon strategy. Namely, it’s worked before. And I don’t just mean in 2020.

Five days before the 2022 midterms Biden delivered a speech warning Americans that, with so many Trump-backed post-liberal populist Republicans running for major offices, “democracy is on the ballot.” He called on voters to ask themselves this question when considering a candidate: “Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?”

Some pundits called the address “head-scratching” in light of polling that showed the economy, not democracy, dominating when voters were asked what the most important issue in the election was. Yet five days later Republicans ended up underperforming badly in a midterm in which the out-party typically cleans up. One Trump-endorsed MAGA acolyte after another fell short in key races, holding the GOP to modest gains in the House and helping Democrats gain a seat in the Senate.

…

For me, the great virtue of the Donilon strategy is that it’ll leave America with no excuses if Trump wins. An election framed around the economy or immigration that ends in Republican victory will let denialists about the country’s decline insist that things would have been different if only Biden had taken a different approach. “He should have emphasized the coup attempt and January 6,” they’ll say. “Surely Americans wouldn’t have reelected Trump if the election had been about that.”

I’m not sure of that at all, personally. I’d like to test the proposition. And if Trump is returned to power, I’d find comfort in knowing that we maximized our collective shame by approaching the race as a referendum on the constitutional order—and chose the other option. If we do this, let’s be clear-eyed about it. No excuses. Trump 2024: Maximum Shame.

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Frank Bruni

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in.

Populism anticipated

For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court: 

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

Australia can have him

Julian Assange on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Jim Ellis, News Items

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.

Flash! Sex Matters!

Health

Sex matters

The United Kingdom’s National Health Services (NHS) plans to propose changes to its constitution that would separate single-sex wards according to “biological sex,” Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins announced Tuesday. The new measure would mean that transgender individuals would be placed in wards with people of their biological sex or in a single-patient room when possible. “The government has been clear that biological sex matters,” Atkins said. “The constitution proposal makes clear what patients can expect from NHS services in meeting their needs, including the different biological needs of the sexes.” The NHS Constitution of England was last updated in 2015 and is required to be updated at least every ten years; there will now be an eight-week review of the proposal.

Via The Morning Dispatch

Judgment Day’s coming

[I]t won’t just be doctors and politicians whose actions will be judged in relation to the excesses surrounding the gender transition of young people, but also those many journalists who’ve chosen to prioritize ideological fashion over journalistic integrity. Singal stands out as one of the few honourable exceptions. Indeed, Bell’s case is exactly the sort of tragedy that he’s consistently warned about over the past five years. To a certain kind of ideologue, such prescience is unforgiveable.

The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal—And Why It Matters

Journalism

Keeping up appearances

Per Politico, Biden’s flacks are frustrated with the Times because it is “stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality.” Key word: appearance.

The Free Press

Wrinkles to iron out

No wonder American consumers are gloomier than they have been at any point in the last two years. The consumer confidence index dropped for the third straight month in April. (Axios)

The Free Press

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this confusing cause and effect?

Protest

Why are they saying this where they’re saying it?

National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke has a question for the pro-Palestinian student protesters continuing their encampment on Columbia University’s campus: “Why, exactly, are these protests happening at all?” he asked. “By this, I don’t mean, ‘What is it that the protesters are saying?’ I know that. By this, I mean, ‘Why is it that they are saying it where they are saying it?’ The faculty at Columbia is not in charge of Israel or the Israeli military; it does not set American foreign policy; and it did not contrive any of the historical or geopolitical questions that underpin the broader fight. I daresay that there are students at Columbia who, for whatever reason, are vexed by the state of the world, but to take this out on their fellow students and the staff at their school makes no more sense than to take it out on the staff at Pedro’s Deli. The two things do not, in any meaningful way, even come close to intersecting. … Sometimes, silence really is golden—even if you’re a discontented college student who has just discovered that life isn’t fair.”

The Morning Dispatch

I posted this on a social medium and got some friendly push-back to the effect that if you can’t protest where you are, where can you protest. Then a third person weighed in with something more helpful, I think, than my post or the first response:

Demands that Western institutions divest from South Africa (of which protests were a part) were successful enough to play a significant role in ending apartheid. So, no, you don’t have to go to Tel Aviv to camp out and yell. But I do think you ought to have a strategy, particularly if your protest is going to disrupt other people’s lives: by what process or mechanism do I hope that my actions (help to) effect the change I desire?

There is, somewhere around here, a sign, professionally constructed and publicly posted, demanding that the Raleigh City Council stop the genocide in Gaza. Not that the city council divest from Israel or condemn the actions of the Israeli government, but that they literally “stop the genocide.” I don’t think “self-indulgent” is necessarily the word, but the complete implausibility of the demand is certainly not a sign of a healthy democracy.

Enablers as “basic humanitarian aid”

At a press conference in front of the occupied academic building at Columbia University: 

Reporter: “Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?” 

Student protester: “To allow it to be brought in. Well, I mean, I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?”

Reporter: “But they did put themselves in that, very deliberately in that situation, in that position, so it seems like you’re saying, ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over the building, now would you please bring us some food and water.’”

For the record, I don’t have strong feelings about this Spring’s demonstrations, nor do I want to have strong feelings.

Culture

Surveillance Capitalismn

When you first heard of the existence of an “internet-enabled rectal thermometer,” you might have thought to yourself, why does a rectal thermometer need enabling by the internet? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. But the internet needs to know the temperature inside your rectum. If you find this intrusive, or extraneous to the purpose for which you bought a thermometer, you may not be ready for an autonomous car. Give yourself an adjustment period. With time, your expectations will dilate to accommodate the probing style of your new friend.

Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive

Deschooling

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Governmental truth

Hobbes … believed that the state’s stability depended on uniformity of religious belief, or at least uniformity of religious expression. Locke, by contrast, argued that force cannot save souls because it cannot change hearts, and even if it could, governments cannot be relied upon to discern religious truth.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (emphasis added).

What government can be relied upon to do is to buttress itself with religion-like accoutrements.

Reassuring stories

Betrayed again — It hurts so good!

Having won the field, the Trumpists now are the Republican Party. Mike Johnson … is one of them. He may not be as dumb as Marjorie Taylor Greene or as likely to give you a handjob in public as Rep. Lauren Boebert, but he’s 100 percent organic, non-GMO Peckerwood. Nevertheless, according to the rules of the Peckerwood game, he’s structurally the enemy: Peckerwoods, once they achieve positions such as speaker of the House, cease to be Peckerwoods, and become the Establishment. Remember, this isn’t politics—this is therapeutic storytelling, and the Peckerwoods have only the one story: “We, the Real Americans, have been betrayed, once again, by the Establishment.” That’s their whole thing.

Kevin D. Williamson. Another one worth reading in full.

Dispossession

Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust. The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not intellectual problems. The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.

David Brooks, How to Destroy Truth

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

4/30/24

The Surprising Truth About Handmaids

The heart of Gilead is not religious extremism, but social engineering.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Handmaids themselves, and the Ceremony that defines their role. The idea that women can be used outside of the confines of marriage as incubators for strongly desired children would be abhorrent to the vast majority of religious conservatives who seem to be The Handmaid’s Tale‘s targets. But it is all the rage in certain secular and progressive circles—and by no means is it limited to the fringes. It has become especially popular among homosexual couples, many of whom pay top dollar for Handmaids who serve a purpose they cannot fulfill themselves.

Not original with me, but I’ve lost the original source.

Schrödinger persons

On a related note:

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

Leah Libresco Sargeant

A cautionary tale

Argentina, for all it’s faults, is a Democracy, and the people keep electing very flawed politicians. They keep electing tumult, and choosing short term satisfaction. They keep voting for the candidate that promises to give them the most things, while also taking stuff away from others. They keep doing that because now, after a century of disarray, part of their national identity is a cynicism that’s reached nihilistic levels.

Chris Arnade

That sounds like the trajectory of another country I know well. I noticed a report this morning that Trump is 6 points ahead in (some) polls.

I can relax but I’m not going to enjoy it.

Aaron Burr = DJT

Charlie Sykes, The choice Republicans face is too good for me to just pull excerpts. I didn’t know what kind of low, narcissistic character Aaron Burr was, and how close he came to being President. We need some Alexander Hamiltons in the GOP (but I fear the GOP is too far gone).

David Frum painstakingly explains why Even Bill Barr Should Prefer Joe Biden by gaming out what’s likely to happen if Trump is elected. Maybe that will prove persuasive to a handful of Trump voters, but it suffices for me that Trump, like Aaron Burr, is a “dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and ‘a man of extreme & irregular ambition.’”

POTUS candidate age disparity

At the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, Joe Biden joked that age is an issue in the election, because “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” (New York Post)

The Free Press

Presidential immunity

Hungry for coverage of last Thursday’s SCOTUS arguments on Presidential criminal immunity, I was nauseous as most of my sources were doing the usual “we know this Court is corrupt; let us now find proof in the hypothetical questions they ask on this case we’re afraid might not go our way.”

Then finally I found sanity:

As several of the justices pointed out, they aren’t making a rule for Donald Trump. They’re making “a rule for the ages,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it—one that has to apply to good presidents and bad ones, Republicans and Democrats, high-minded prosecutors and partisan ones. It can be easy to focus on “the needs of the moment,” as Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

And here’s the fear. If the high court gives presidents too much immunity, the White House could turn into a “crime center,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. Too little immunity, and there’s an endless cycle of prosecutions. The ability to find some vague statute will “be used against the current president or the next president,” Kavanaugh said, “and the next president and the next president after that.”

So how will this all shake out? I can’t say for sure, of course. And oral arguments—even a two-hour and 40-minute session—can tell you only so much. But I predict this will be a unanimous ruling instructing the district court to determine which of the charged acts were clearly outside the authority of the president, whether it was an official act or not.

Sarah Isgur

Nellie’s miscellany

  • Every time you see the word disinformation, remember that The New York Times said it was “a conspiracy theory” that Covid came from a lab.
  • In Santa Monica, a new 122-unit homeless housing project is moving ahead; it’s projected to cost $1 million per unit to build. That’s the optimistic projection! And in San Francisco, the city built special housing just for the middle class. The result: 80 percent of units in some of these buildings are empty. Why? “A city bureaucracy so convoluted that qualifying for an apartment involves a tortured and time-consuming process,” according to a great San Francisco Chronicle story. I promise that if you let capitalism work, supply will meet demand. Alternatively, we can keep trying these government scams, raise taxes to 70 percent, and build more empty construction and overpriced pot shops and Sombritas and a single charging station.

Nellie Bowles

(See comment below, which puts )

Wordplay

  • the Daily Stormer of gender woo
  • ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand
  • the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science
  • people who care less about being right than looking virtuous
  • “communicators” … whose job is to make consensus look sciency

Mary Harrington, Why the centrists changed their trans tune – UnHerd

dire normalization

David Frum’s odd characterization of a televised Biden-Trump Presidential debate: “The networks want their show, but to give the challenger equal status on a TV stage would be a dire normalization of his attempted coup.”

Xitter

Someone’s (Charlie Sykes? coinage for X, formerly known as Twitter. I like it for the rich possibilities of how to pronounce it.

Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Touch Screens Are Ruining Cars – The Atlantic

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Saturday, 4/6/24

Today is that day the Purdue Boilermaker Men advance to the NCAA Championship game by ending the fairy tale run of DJ Burns and NC State. Remember, you read it here first. (Caveat: I have no money riding on any games and you certainly shouldn’t put money on my prediction.)

Meta

America the experiment

America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work,

Barack Obama

No sheaf of papers can protect us

Joseph de Maistre. Writing in 1809, he scoffed at the idea that any document written by mortal hands could ever design and establish genuinely new foundational laws. The spirit of any such laws was invariably already written on the hearts of those men who attempted to crudely reduce them to mere lines on a piece of paper. “Precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written,” he wrote. The true constitution of a strong and functional nation was always “that admirable, unique, and infallible public spirit, beyond all praise, which directs everything, which protects everything. What is written is nothing.”

…

What is America’s implicit constitution today? Naturally, it’s never been fully captured in writing, though some authors, such as Christopher Caldwell, have variously attempted to nail it down here and there. If pressed to summarise, I might say it is one that values safety and security over freedom; top-down control over self-governance; empty egalitarian posturing over excellence; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; bureaucracy over accountability; narcissistic emotivism over duty; fantasy over reality; global ambitions over national loyalty; dreams of progress over eternal and transcendent truths — in short, the same spirit that animates our out-of-control managerial regime. It’s the spirit which saw that regime not hesitate to impose Covid lockdowns, or trash the rule of law and attempt to jail political opponents (and for half the country to view this as acceptable or even admirable); it’s what has produced Supreme Court justices who fret free speech would undermine the security state.

N.S. Lyons, at UnHerd

Luxury beliefs before 2019

The neologism “luxury beliefs” is only five years old, but what it describes was noted decades ago (if not earlier):

Harlem itself, and every individual Negro in it, is a living condemnation of our so-called “culture.” Harlem is there by way of a divine indictment against New York City and the people who live downtown and make their money downtown. The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue: they are God’s commentary on the whole of our society.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

And again I say, “Beauty Will Save the World”

At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky.

Garrison Keillor

Rackets

EVs

With their heavy weight and quick acceleration, EVs tend to burn through tires about 20% faster than internal combustion vehicles do, according to consultancy firm AlixPartners. And the tires cost about 50% more.

Via Dense Discovery Issue 282

Trump looting the GOP

One might assume that a presidential nominee who generates as much devotion as Mr. Trump would be a financial boon to his party. One would be wrong. With Mr. Trump, everything is about Mr. Trump … While the Republican base may be smitten with Mr. Trump, plenty of big-money donors are skittish about bankrolling his nonsense. The former president has been scrambling to close the gap, leering at potential funders as if they were contestants at the Miss Universe pageant.

Michelle Cottle, Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party

I haven’t seen gullibility like today’s GOP since Harlem stood by its man Adam Clayton Powell.

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

Formerly friendly, I’m now a little leery of Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo (not the Federalist Society) provided Donald Trump with the list of outstanding conservative prospective Supreme Court Nominees that Trump ran on in 2016 and that probably made the difference in the Election. Kudos to him for that. I didn’t believe Trump would keep his promise to nominate from that list, and for that and other reasons, I didn’t vote for him.

But about the time Leo got on the Trump train, his life appears to have take a dramatic turn:

The Campaign for Accountability’s complaint alleges that “Leo-affiliated nonprofits” paid BH Group and CRC Advisors a total of $50.3 million between 2016 and 2020.

During this period, according to the complaint, Leo’s lifestyle changed:

In August 2018, he paid off the 30-year mortgage on the Mclean, Va. home, most of which was still outstanding on the payoff date. Later that same year, Leonard Leo bought a $3.3 million summer home with 11 bedrooms in Mount Desert, an affluent seaside village on the coast of Maine, using, in part, a 20-year mortgage of $2,310,000. Leonard Leo paid off the entire balance of that mortgage just one year later in July 2019. In September 2021, Leonard Leo bought a second home in Mount Desert for $1.65 million.

The complaint was based in part on a March 2023 Politico story by Heidi Przybyla. She wrote that her “investigation, based on dozens of financial, property and public records dating from 2000 to 2021, found that Leo’s lifestyle took a lavish turn beginning in 2016,” citing Leo’s purchases of the Maine properties along with “four new cars, private school tuition for his children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Catholic causes and a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse.”

Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around

Part of my leeriness is probably because I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, which describes Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson’s extremely profitable financial con in his promotion of the 1920s Klan. The story is full of MAGA-like personalities (right down to the rapes) and profiteering.

Trump’s second term, with Leonard Leo’s help, is shaping up to be a nightmare for true conservatism and a repudiation of much of the excellent work Leo’s judicial list did in the first Trump term. Truly Donald Trump has a reverse Midas touch.

Just asking questions

I’m no longer a Ben Shapiro fan, but when he’s right, he’s right.

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:

  1. God is on my political party’s side.
  2. My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.
  3. My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.
  4. I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.
  5. It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.

Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. …

Political Therapeutic Deism has the benefit of making clear what we are seeing is the misappropriation of religious language and symbols for political ends. It also harkens to a term (Moral Therapeutic Deism) which has been thoroughly rejected by some of the very kind of people “Christian nationalists” seek to persuade to their way of thinking. They want to equate opposition to their political proposals as opposition to Christianity itself. Why would we help them?

Michael Wear

Until a better term comes along, I expect to use political therapeutic deism for the faux-evangelical Trumpists that MSM calls “white Christian nationalist.”

“But the judges” no longer applies

For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”

Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell. 

Contrary to the fears of liberals and the misplaced hopes of Trump, conservative judicial appointees upheld the principle of judicial independence. They refused to serve as reliable partisans and handed Trump and his administration important legal defeats. Crucially, Trump’s nominees rejected his baseless claims of a stolen election.

But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers. 

Republicans in Congress barely resisted these actions and increasingly behaved more like courtiers than members of a co-equal branch of government.

…

Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.

Gregg T. Nunziata, The Conservative Legal Movement Got Everything It Wanted. It Could Lose It All

Anyone who says “but the judges” to justify voting for Trump in 2024 is seriously misguided. He’s disappointed with his first-term SCOTUS nominees in particular, as they’ve not been the kinds of toadies he wants. Next time, he’ll nominate toadies, not excellent jurists, and since the Senate is going to flip (11 Republicans are up for re-election, 23 Democrats) he’ll get them confirmed.

Good advice, since abandoned

Listen to me. Listen. If the twentieth century tells us anything, it’s that whenever you hear anyone standing before a crowd, winding them up about the cause of creating utopia on earth, you had better run.

Rod Dreher, December 12, 2020. I’m sorry to say that he has since reconciled himself to a supposed necessity to vote for Trump.

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

Scotland has a new hate speech law that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” J.K. Rowling threw down the gauntlet:

On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.” … “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

The Free Press

Bomb-thrower

Responding to an Emma Green New Yorker article on classical education:

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

Alan Jacobs, against the factory of unreason

Nellie snippets

  • Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. (I could have pulled this for “Rackets,” above.)
  • It is odd that Trump got the reputation of being The End of the American Press, when Biden is really the one who hates questions and shuns journalists. Remember Trump? How he would actually never stop talking? How he’d sit and antagonize reporters endlessly? But oh, he’d talk. It was alarming, often described as “rambling.” But at least we all knew exactly what was going through his mind (chaos, tangents, rage, pettiness, pretty good jokes, Rosie O’Donnell, more Rosie O’Donnell, why was it always Rosie O’Donnell).
  • [S]tudent loan relief is the wrong approach. Colleges should simply not cost this much. Solution: eliminate 90 percent of university administrator roles, since at least that many are fully fake. Offer incentives for kids to enroll in trade schools or community colleges. Boom, loan crisis solved, you’re welcome. Next topic.
  • From Reuters
  • America’s leading women’s rights group of yesteryear is still arguing that it’s white supremacy to maintain girls’ sports. Here’s NOW, the National Organization of Women: “Repeat after us: Weaponizing womanhood against other women is white supremacist patriarchy at work. Making people believe there isn’t enough space for trans women in sports is white supremacist patriarchy at work.” Yes, it’s white supremacist patriarchy to argue. . . that someone who’s gone through male puberty might have an unfair advantage in, let’s say, rugby. Interesting. Fascinating. I will repeat until I am clean.

Nellie Bowles

I’m that guy

When I think of the consciousness that generates the circular sorrow of “Ifs eternally,” or the one trying to find the one thing that will unify all the disparate experiences of one life, I think of a man—almost always a man, though there are notable exceptions—sitting alone in a room and doggedly trying to figure it all out.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

Jumping the gun?

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

Meta-Politics

The fallacy of Boromir

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

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

What the political parties have become

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

The Economist

2000 Jackasses

This is quite a rout:

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

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

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

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

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

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

Nick Catoggio.

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

AI

On the Google Gemini AI Fiasco

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

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

AI

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

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

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

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

Time magazine, H/T Eugene Volokh

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

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

Furiners

Islam

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

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

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

Both sides

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

American exceptionalism

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

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

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

Rebecca Solnit.

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

Culture

Imagine that

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

Rob Henderson, Troubled (quotes via Rod Dreher)

More, apropos of boyfriend child abuse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dystopian creepiness

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

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

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

Presented with just one comment

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

Scott Yenor, Anatomy of a Cancellation.

Comment: I find this plausible.

Calamity

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

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Relative humiliation

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Thursday, 11/16/23

Culture

Mind-bender

As we are wont to do, we sent “help” to Rwanda after genocide there. At least one, they got a tart and stinging reception:

We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy, there was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.

A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. Via Letters.

Strange congruence

It’s a real dog-bites-man story, to write about how religious liberalism is dying. But Ryan Burge, a political scientist who specializes in religion (and a pastor of a liberal Baptist congregation), notes a new academic paper producing more evidence that liberals abandon religion, while conservatives find churches where they feel comfortable with their politics. Read the paper via the link.

Via Rod Dreher (emphasis added).

I consider it a shame and a scandal that there should be a measurable link between conservative politics and religiosity. I could be wrong — specifically, I could be over-reacting to the toxicity of so much of American politicized religion (the bane of my existence for more than 30 years) — but I think authentic Christianity is substantially orthogonal to American political categories, or at least can accommodate a bit more than center-left to center-right. Churches should make very few feel like aliens because of their politics.

Magnificent scatological rant

Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder. It even drove me to the dictionary twice. (I had no idea what a fluffer was.)

City Lights go out

On Monday, Rachel Swan reported for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Czech TV journalist Bohumil Vostal was capturing what he thought would be a majestic shot — San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore, steeped in the gathering dusk — when three masked assailants approached with guns pointed.

“They were heading at my camera man, aiming a gun at his stomach, and one at my head,” Vostal said in an interview Monday, growing breathless as he recounted the harrowing incident at 5 p.m. the night before.

…Like many reporters, Vostal had seen news coverage of unruly shoplifters, open-air drug markets and commercial vacancies, but he hoped to portray the city in a more positive light…

The Chronicle notes that Mr. Vostal and his colleagues are from a public television station, so perhaps they were just as eager as U.S. public broadcasters to paint flattering portraits of jurisdictions run by leftists. But that was before the harrowing incident. And if you’ve lost Bohumil Vostal, you’ve lost middle America.

Heather Knight [reports](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/san-francisco-apec-czech-reporter.html#:~:text=The thieves grabbed $18,000 worth,lost all of his footage.) for the New York Times:

The thieves grabbed $18,000 worth of equipment, including a camera, lights and a tripod, and jumped into a getaway car as a stunned Mr. Vostal futilely tried to memorize its license plate.

“They took my research, my time, my ideas,” Mr. Vostal said, distraught that he lost all of his footage. “That is why I’m angry, you know?”

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I’m not gloating. I’m not feeling schadenfreude. I was fond of San Francisco, though I visited only once and only very briefly. Now they’ve taken it away by crime.

I’m not certain, though, about the Wall Street Journal’s habitual spin about “jurisdictions run by leftists” or such. My midwestern city is hugely more crime-ridden than when I was growing up, and it’s run by Chamber of Commerce types from center left to, occasionally, center-right (the further right seems unable to field appealing candidates).

Authoritarian, Totalitarian

“To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology.

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies.

Two lawyers agree: lawyering is for lawyers, and in courtrooms

David French: You know, I’m glad you said what you said about the importance of legal advocates because I mean, it’s just absolutely indispensable as a truth seeking mechanism to have smart people on 100% on the side of their respective clients, but I haven’t found a better way to get to truth.

Sarah Isgur: Haven’t found a better way.

David French: But for that Sarah that I think people haven’t really absorbed and that the “but” is that only works in the court system, okay.

Because in the court system you have rules of evidence you have rules of decorum you have all of that energy, and advocacy is channeled through a code of ethics into a formalized system where your advocacy is tested in front of an impartial judge or impartial jury, where you have a capable opponent, where you have rules of evidence.

Here’s what’s really hurting our society, is we have people who adopt a lawyer mentality in life, in activism writ large, where there aren’t rules of evidence, where there aren’t codes of ethics, and so what’s happening is we’re having this activism-driven world, where people are approaching their political cause, or their political candidate, with all the zeal that a lawyer has for their client and none of the rules and none of the limitations. And it’s creating this activist-driven culture where, as opposed to in courts, where the two advocates going at each other is a truth-seeking function because it’s channeled through all the rules with an impartial jurist. And outside of the courtroom, that same zealous advocacy mindset. becomes a truth-obscuring function. And it’s one of the reasons why we have such a problem with just knowing basic simple facts in this country right now is that we have two sides that are treating their life as partisans as if they’re lawyers unbounded by rules of ethics.

And that is really destroying … our society’s truth-seeking ability because it’s a bastardized form of the truth-seeking function we pour into our court system. And this activist mindset and the sort of activist ethos is really sort of eating our institutions alive, and so, yeah, it’s honorable to be a lawyer as a lawyer in a court system. If you’re going to take the lawyer mindset, just as a citizen, talking about your sort of favorite ideas or your political ideas. political party or your candidate, et cetera, you’re missing it, you’re missing it.

We need a lot more jurists, people who are trying to discover the truth, then we need more activists, and we’re overrun with activists right now.

Advisory Opinions

Add the vote of this retired lawyer to those of David and Sarah.

Half right

Subsidies for electric vehicles are a huge mistake. These cars are conceptually the same battery and motor as a fourth-grade science project—not a great innovation. And given high prices for EVs, subsidies are mainly a giveaway to the already well-off. If you add up carbon emissions from manufacturing, daily use and end of life, EVs have total life-cycle emissions 30% lower than gasoline-powered autos. In Silicon Valley, something is considered truly transformational if it’s 10 times better, not a third.

Andy Kesler, Wall Street Journal. Kesler thinks that infrastructure for autonomous cars is a better investment. He makes a good case, but I can’t entirely shake Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive

Political-ish

Looking back

The reality of Biden becoming president on Wednesday is too difficult to square away, so it is simply not being squared. Instead, some are falling deeper into delusion, expanding a divide on the right that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called “not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.”

Rosie Gray, Trump Supporters’s Break With Reality Will Outlast Him, January 18, 2021.

I’d say she nailed that. We have not bridged it yet, nearly three years later, and I don’t even see much progress on bridge-building.

Contrasting demeanors

Trump has built a base of fanatic messianic support on the right preaching that America is terrible and only he can save it. Scott, essentially, is arguing that America is wonderful and his ascension to the Senate in the first state to secede from the Union before the Civil War proves it. For the party to suddenly shift from Trumpism to Scottism would be as disorienting and unlikely as shifting from, er, Tea Party conservatism to Trumpism.

Nick Cattogio, How Tim Scott Wins, published May 5 of this year.

Judging by his own rhetoric, Trump’s become the most overtly fascist major-party candidate in American history, yet he’s trouncing respectable opponents like Tim Scott in the Republican primary and would likely defeat Biden if the election were held today. How can that be? Do American voters agree with the right about “what time it is”? (You wouldn’t know it from last week’s election result.) Or have they not realized yet what they’re getting themselves into?

Nick Cattogio, What Time It Is

I hope you don’t need my commentary on this

Mike Davis, who’s a likely pick for Attorney General in a restored Trump administration, has listed five top-priority agenda items for such a restoration:

  1. Fire members of the deep state executive branch [using Schedule F reform];
  2. Indict the entire Biden family;  
  3. Deport 10 million people;
  4. Detain people at Gitmo;
  5. Pardon all people serving time or on trial for acts undertaken on January 6.

Via Damon Linker

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

Alexander Riley

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

Kristallnacht 2023

Today is the 85th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.

If you don’t know, look it up (and may God have mercy on your soul).

Culture

Swifties

I do not follow Taylor Swift (I know that she has not taken on the affect of a whore, a pop music rarity I appreciate), but other sure do — even the august Economist:

Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her album “1989” sold nearly 1.7m copies in its first week post-release, surpassing the 1.3m sales of the original in 2014. The pop singer started re-recording her albums in 2021 as a way of regaining control of her master tapes, after Big Machine, her former record label, sold the original masters to Scooter Braun, a music mogul.

Pretty sharp thinking, that — and another 1.7 million album sales to boot.

VR

Virtual reality is friction-free. The dissidents are removed from the system. People get used to that, and real life seems intimidating. Maybe that’s why so many internet pioneers are tempted by going to space or the metaverse. That sense of a clean slate. In real life, there is history.

Sherry Turkle at Crooked Timber

Humblebragging

David Bernstein’s conclusion to Bill Ackman’s Letter to Harvard re Widespread Antisemitism on Campus

The Jewish intellect

May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it.

Walter Kaufmann in his translator’s preface to Basic Writings of Nietzsche.

Things nobody’d dare say today

If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little—not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Did we forsake our sin or vice-versa?

Fewer men are needed as gang workers in the fields: slavery has become uneconomical.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

(But I’m sure we abolished slavery purely out of the goodness of our hearts. Right?)

The Feast of Hot Takes

In many cultures, holidays are celebrated in tandem, on consecutive days. Halloween is followed by the Day of the Dead; Christmas is followed by Boxing Day; Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday; New Year’s Eve is followed by, uh, New Year’s Day.

There’s a special pairing for pundits: Election Day is followed by The Feast of Hot Takes.

On The Feast of Hot Takes, you gather piecemeal results spread across different regions from the previous evening and arrange them to form a mosaic that perfectly matches your priors.

Nick Cattogio

Politics

At or over the brink

I have been a reluctant liberal democrat (small l, small d) because I cannot think of a better and more just way to govern a fractious, highly diverse polity like the United States. Christian nationalism? It could work in Hungary, which is far less religious but far more monocultural than America, but it is very hard to see how America could pull it off and remain a democracy. Anyway, whose Christianity? The Catholic integralists? The Calvinist integralists? Seems to me that if we Christians can’t keep our own churches from bleeding out, the idea of ruling the country is a pipe dream.

… Please understand, I want to live in a properly liberal democratic society. But liberal democracy doesn’t exist outside of a context. You have to hold prior beliefs that serve as a foundation for equal treatment under law, for free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and all the rest. The moment, for example, that you believe that some people deserve preferential treatment under the law because of their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity, you have largely ceased to be a liberal democrat, whether you know it or not.

… [I]f it comes down to a choice of having to support Caesarism as a way to protect the rights and interests, and even the lives, of my family and people I care about, or keep bowing to the idol of liberal democracy while the radical Left takes over, then I’ll be a reluctant Caesarist.

Rod Dreher (italics added).

Despite my italics, it’s that last paragraph that’s the most dangerous, because millions of MAGA Americans have concluded (delusionally, I think) that it has come down to that — that the Democrats truly are an immanent and existential threat. (I understand that the Democrats may reciprocate, but despite not having voted Democrat in a Presidential race since 1972, I’m more sympathetic to their conclusion than the MAGA conclusion. See the next item.)

I read a bit about the French Revolutionaries very recently, and they brought to my mind not Antifa, but MAGAworld; not the Summer of 2020 but January 6, 2021.

But in the spirit of refusing to pick my poison, I remain a reluctant liberal democrat who expects for vote for neither major-party POTUS candidate next year.

More Dreher:

The message is clear: … the people vote the way the ruling class in the US and western Europe want, and you’ve got a democracy; if not, well, there’s nothing wrong with your authoritarian bigot country that a Washington-financed Color Revolution can’t fix.

There’s truth in that even if Rod’s catastrophism has pushed him to or over the edge.

Why the far Right is worse than the far Left

Trump’s extremism isn’t mainly a function of policy commitments, however much his positions on immigration, trade, and foreign policy are heretical in the context of the Reaganite conservatism that dominated the GOP from 1980 until 2016. No, Trump is a threat to American democracy primarily because of his tactical extremism—that is, his indifference to the rule of law, procedural norms, and above all his defiance of the democratic rules by attempting a self-coup in the two months following the 2020 election. Not even the most radically left-wing faction of the Democratic Party has shown any indication of favoring such flagrantly anti-democratic tactics for gaining and holding political power.

…

The right-wing media ecosystem is a machine that runs on the fallacy of composition.

Damon Linker. As hinted, I’m inclined to agree with Linker in the rather abstract way of one committed to despising both major parties.

DeSantis’ disqualifying “signature move”

Just once, … I’d like to see [Ron DeSantis] debate without proposing a policy that violates the Constitution. Yet there he went again, proposing plainly unconstitutional summary executions for fentanyl smugglers at the border and bragging about violating the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian student groups on Florida campuses. Unconstitutional policymaking is a divisive waste of time, but that remains DeSantis’s signature move.

David French, part of a New York Times panel analyzing performances in the third GOP Presidential debate.

DeSantis isn’t just shooting off his mouth. Several of his “successful” signature legislative initiatives in Florida have been unconstitutional.

Jamelle Bouie, on the same panel, had one of his periodic flashes of insight:

Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal. There’s not really much of an audience in the Republican primary electorate for what DeSantis is trying to sell, and it doesn’t help him that it seems he hates being a salesman of any sort.

That really wraps up my impression of DeSantis and puts a bow on it.

A flash of sanity; settled mendacity

It’s not a question between right versus left anymore. It’s normal versus crazy …

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders says something sensible. Unfortunately, she didn’t stop there:

… and President Biden and the left are doubling down on crazy.

Wut?!?!

Bummer of the day

I had understood that the poll showing Trump ahead of Biden in six swing states was a piece of crap that only called landlines. That was encouraging.

Unfortunately, it appears to have been false:

The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate. The margin of sampling error for each state poll is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, plus or minus 4.5 points in Georgia, plus or minus 4.6 points in Pennsylvania and plus or minus 4.8 points in Wisconsin.

So now I’m relying on my impression that those margins of error are awfully big.

Silver lining: My home state is still showing solid red, which means I at least can again vote my conscience instead of trying to suss out who’s the lesser evil between the major parties.

The Left Made Us Do It!

So how did a party and a political movement that once saw itself as a vanguard of objective truth end up on the side that gets to make up its own facts, its own scripts, its own realities?

Rich Tafel, the chief executive of Public Squared, developed a training called Cultural Translation, which teaches participants how to find shared values to build bridges across different worldviews. He told me the narrative he’s heard from people on the right is that they tried fighting the left for years, nominating admirable people like John McCain and Mitt Romney, but these leaders failed to understand how the game had changed. “Those on the right argue that claiming that there are objective truths and hard realities didn’t work against the identity politics of the postmodern left,” according to Mr. Tafel. “Now, they’d say, they are playing by the same rules.” In fact, he said, “MAGA has weaponized postmodernism in a way the left never did.”

Mr. Tafel added that MAGA world “likes the trolling nature of the postmodern right and the vicious attacks” against those they oppose. “The right likes the snark, irony and sarcasm of it all.”

Peter Wehner, Donald Trump Has Closed the Republican Mind

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

David French

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