Attention Economy (and more)

Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age is one of the more thought-provoking things I’ve read in the past few weeks, and I’ve been reading a lot of thought-provoking things. It’s your introduction to “the attention economy” and it’s worth burning a freebie at the New York Times’ metered paywall.

Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.
“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, [Liz Cheney] went further. Trump “does not have a role as the leader of our party going forward,” she asserted, making a public case—to viewers of Trump’s onetime favorite network—that expanded on the one she delivered in the House GOP Conference meeting on Wednesday.

Cheney isn’t alone. Late last week, it became clear that Sen. Ben Sasse was headed toward another censure from the Nebraska Republican Party. Among his supposed offenses: accusing Trump of “pouring gasoline on these fires of division” that led to a riot at the U.S. Capitol and “persistently engag[ing] in public acts of ridicule and calumny” against the former president.

Sasse—who was just elected to a second six-year term—did not shy away from the confrontation, instead cutting a five-minute video response to the Nebraska GOP’s State Central Committee. “You are welcome to censure me again,” he said, “but let’s be clear about why: It’s because I still believe (as you used to) that politics is not about the weird worship of one dude.”

At the end of the message, Sasse, like Cheney, pointed to the future. “We’re gonna have to choose between conservatism and madness,” he said, “between just railing about who we’re mad at, versus actually trying to persuade rising generations of Americans again. That’s where I’m focused. And I sincerely hope that many of you will join in celebrating these big, worthy causes for freedom.”

[Shout-outs to Sen. Pat Toomey, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez and Rep. Peter Meijer omitted.]

… Only 21 percent of Republicans in a recent Echelon Insights poll strongly or somewhat supported impeaching and convicting President Trump.

But the same poll also found Trump’s stranglehold on the party’s voters loosening. In December, according to the survey, 61 percent of GOP voters said they hoped Trump would continue to be “the leading voice” for Republicans going forward. By January, that number had dropped to just 41 percent. After the events of January 6, only 45 percent of Republican voters said they wanted Trump to run for president again in 2024, down from 65 percent the month prior.

The Morning Dispatch

How these sane people live in the same party with Matt Gaetz, MTG and other contemptible clowns is an open question, but I can understand them not wanting to cede the party of Lincoln to limelight-loving loons.

I was shocked that OAN would run Mike Lindell’s 3-hour Absolute Proof conspiracy video, considering reports that it repeats defamatory claims OAN already had retracted under threat of lawsuit. But this extraordinary disclaimer helps me understand.

I won’t watch the video because:

People I trust and respect have already debunked the major “stolen election” evidence — some of which is fabricated, some of which is third-hand hearsay, and some of which may be honest misunderstandings of the significance of first-hand observation (e.g., “when I went to bed, Trump was ahead but when I woke up Biden was pulling away” — a red crest/blue wave that was long predicted and easily understood, but that Trump consciously exploited with his premature victory announcement).
I’m not so sophisticated about election mechanics that I can, on my own and in real time, dismiss all the claims that might be made in a 3-hour video. So watching it would only produce confusion — probably unwarranted (see my appeal to authority in the preceding point) — or require hours and hours more to regain a working clarity.
I do not apologize for trusting analyses of people I’ve found trustworthy. Everyone does it. Everybody budgets how much time to spend on various things, and most people budget little time for seemingly-quixotic quests, If others find a cocaine-addled domestic abuser, conspiracy theorist and TV pitchman more plausible than seasoned political observers, all I can say is “bless their hearts.”

Timothy Wilks, 20, is shot and killed outside of Nashville’s Urban Air Trampoline and Adventure Park. Police told reporters that Wilks was trying to create a viral video of himself staging a fake robbery prank for his YouTube channel. Apparently unaware of the hilarity of having a stranger run at you and your friends with butcher knives, one of Wilks’ intended foils drew a pistol and shot him dead.

The Dangers of the Derp State – The Dispatch

Well, bless his heart, he was just trying to gain the attention to which he’s entitled.

The state of Victoria in Australia … just passed a bill that will considerably intensify the conflict between religious freedom, individual choice, and identity politics. And it might well become a model for laws elsewhere in the democratic world.

The legislation that just passed is the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill 2020 …

The law defines a change or suppression practice as follows:

“a practice or conduct directed towards a person, whether with or without the person’s consent on the basis of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity; and for the purpose of changing or suppressing the sexual orientation or gender identity of the person; or inducing the person to change or suppress their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

…

But the really important part of the bill from a religious perspective is its list of “change or suppression practices.” This includes: “carrying out a religious practice, including but not limited to, a prayer-based practice, a deliverance practice or an exorcism.”

In short, if someone asks a pastor, a priest, or a Christian friend to pray for them that their sexual desires or gender dysphoria might be changed, that pastor, priest, or friend runs the risk of committing a criminal offense. Presumably this also applies to parents praying for their children—or perhaps even parents teaching their children that untrammeled expressions of sexual desire (at least within the canons of contemporary bourgeois taste) are inappropriate.

…

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

And so prayer for such heretics must be prohibited, even if they specifically ask for it. This is not so much because it harms the people for whom it is being offered, but simply because it witnesses to the fact that not all people—not even all gay and trans people—buy into the current confections of the politics of sexual identity.

Perhaps that is encouraging. Perhaps at long last Western societies are beginning to wake up to the fact that Christianity at its very core witnesses to the fact that the world is not as it should be ….

Prohibiting Prayer in Australia | Carl R. Trueman | First Things

A Los Angeles Times opinion column is firing up the Internet after Virginia Heffernan wrote about her anguish in not knowing how to respond to neighbors cleared the snow on her driveway. They problem is that they also voted for former President Donald Trump. The column entitled “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?” explores her struggle with how to respond while comparing all Trump supporters to Nazis and Hezbollah. It is unfortunately hardly surprising to see such unhinged hateful comparisons in today’s age of rage. What was surprising is need to publish such a column containing gratuitous attacks on over 70 million voters as compared to genocidal murders or terrorists.

Thank You For Shoveling My Driveway . . . You Nazi? LA Times Runs Bizarre Column Revealing Liberal Angst And Anger – JONATHAN TURLEY

I never thought the end of the world would be so funny.

Jonathan Pageau, Q&A at Seattle Conference – Oct. 2017 – The Symbolic World

Barstool Conservatives and other delights

What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and “SJWs,” opposition to the popularization of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title IX mafia. Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about. On economic questions their views are a curious and at times incoherent mixture of standard libertarian talking points and pseudo-populism, embracing lower taxes on the one hand and stimulus checks and stricter regulation of social media platforms on the other.

… Meanwhile, a small number of earnest social conservatives will be disgusted. But I suspect that a majority of them will gladly make their peace with the new order of things.

This is in part because while Barstool conservatives might regard, say, homeschooling families of 10 as freaks, they do not regard them with loathing, much less consider their very existence a threat to the American way of life as they understand it. Social conservatives themselves have largely accepted that, with the possible exception of abortion, the great battles have been lost for good. Oberfegell will never be overturned even with nine votes on the Supreme Court. Instead the best that can be hoped for is a kind of recusancy, a limited accommodation for a few hundred thousand families who cling to traditions that in the decades to come will appear as bizarre as those of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Matthew Walther, Rise of the Barstool conservatives (emphasis added).

We can quibble over the label, but I think it’s fair to say that a lot of social conservatives have resigned themselves to voting for people who “do not regard them with loathing, much less consider their very existence a threat to the American way of life as they understand it.”

I understand the temptation. I considered voting Democrat in the primaries to vote for Bernie, the Democrat who struck me as so fixated on advancing socialism that he had little energy left for anti-Christian pogroms. But I didn’t, and although I’m under no illusions about reversing losses on the issues I’ve loved and lost, a social issue platform of “meh” is not good enough for my vote.

For hundreds of years at common law, moreover, while infertility was no ground for declaring a marriage void, only coitus was recognized as consummating (completing) a marriage. No other sexual act between man and woman could. What could make sense of these two practices?

Ryan T. Anderson et al., What Is Marriage?

I know the battle is lost, but I still can’t resist the opportunity to remind people that same-sex marriage swallows the hedonic marriage view lock, stock and barrel, and conservatives are justified if they ask (as fewer and fewer do) why government should be in the business of issuing licenses for people to enter what amounts to no more than relatively long-term pleasurable pairings.

Tesla posted its first full year of net income in 2020 — but not because of sales to its customers.

Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can’t, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements — such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars.

It’s a lucrative business for Tesla — bringing in $3.3 billion over the course of the last five years, nearly half of that in 2020 alone. The $1.6 billion in regulatory credits it received last year far outweighed Tesla’s net income of $721 million — meaning Tesla would have otherwise posted a net loss in 2020.

“These guys are losing money selling cars. They’re making money selling credits. And the credits are going away,” said Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research and one of the biggest bears on Tesla shares.

Tesla top executives concede the company can’t count on that source of cash continuing.

Tesla’s dirty little secret: Its net profit doesn’t come from selling cars

For many years, congressional Republicans have operated under a few rules:

* My way or the highway (you’re with the party consensus or you’re against the party).
* Politics is a zero-sum game (so there is no such thing as a compromise that can benefit both sides).
* Don’t fraternize across the aisle (which might lead to learning from Democrats or even wanting to compromise with them).

In the last five years, they added two more: If you don’t have something nice to say about Donald Trump, say nothing at all and If you repeat a lie enough times, you can act as if it’s true.

Now that the Republicans have lost control of the Senate, the House, and the presidency, they are both emboldened and scared at the same time. Emboldened because they can revert to their natural mode of obstructionism without responsibility for governing. And scared because two of President Biden’s main themes so far—his pleas for unity and his commitment to reality—directly threaten their tactics of division and fantasy.

…

The QAnon rioters were gone from the Capitol by the end of the day on January 6, but QAnon is now represented by outspoken members of Congress. It is disturbing to hear Nancy Pelosi say, as she did this week, “The enemy is within.” But she’s not wrong.

Brian Karem, The GOP Has Nothing to Offer – The Bulwark

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

Alan Jacobs

If you were looking for the faith-free version of [Cicely] Tyson’s life, the natural place to turn was The New York Times.

This story did a great job of capturing her impact on American culture, especially in terms of the sacrifices she made to portray African-American life with style, power and dignity. Here are two crucial summary paragraphs on that essential theme:

“In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.

“Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s ‘The Trip to Bountiful.'”

But the only reference to her Christian faith — negative, of course — came in this bite of biography:

“Cicely Tyson was born in East Harlem on Dec. 19, 1924, the youngest of three children of William and Theodosia (also known as Frederica) Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a carpenter and painter, and her mother was a domestic worker. Her parents separated when she was 10, and the children were raised by a strict Christian mother who did not permit movies or dates.”

The Times also offered an “appraisal” of Tyson’s career with this striking headline: “Cicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall Apart.”

…

The New York Times is important, of course, but it is even more important that the Associated Press served up three stories about Tyson’s life, career and cultural impact without a single reference to her Christian faith (other than a fleeting reference to God in a Michelle Obama tribute quotation). These are the stories that would appear in the vast majority of American newspapers.

…

Now, I am happy to note that the Los Angeles Times package about Tyson did a much better job of weaving her own words into its multi-story package about her death.

It was hard to edit God out of Cicely Tyson’s epic story, but some journalists gave it a try — GetReligion

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell waded into the intra-GOP squabbles last night, declaring Rep. Liz Cheney “an important leader in our party and in our nation” and decrying Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s embrace of “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer for the Republican Party.”

The Morning Dispatch

Memo to a**h*le Matt Gaetz: If you shoot at the GOAT’s friend, you’re gonna hafta kill the GOAT, too. And you didn’t:

What Wednesday did reveal, however, is the relative strength of the GOP’s various factions. Only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach President Trump last month; on a secret ballot, 145 supported Cheney’s right to do so. A staggering 139 House members objected to the electoral results in at least one state on January 6; on a secret ballot, “only” 61 wanted to boot Cheney for her vote of conscience.

Conservatives concerned with the direction of the GOP in recent years may take solace in these discrepancies. As we’ve written repeatedly, the majority of Republican lawmakers here in Washington are far less Trumpy personally than they would ever let on. But on a political level, the public persona is the one that matters: It’s what voters see, how narratives are shaped, and how decisions are made.

At some point, elected Republicans may once again feel comfortable speaking their whole mind. But not yet. Expect things to revert to normal when the cameras are back on today during the vote to punish Greene.

After all, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll, Greene is significantly more popular with GOP voters than Cheney is, +10 net favorability to -28.

The Morning Dispatch: Cheney Triumphs in Conference Vote

“Trump was our greatest champion, and it still wasn’t enough. He tried his very best. He did so much, but he’s only one man…I even helped stormed(sic) the capitol today, but it only made things worse…Why, God? Why? WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US? Unless…Trump still has a plan?”

25-year-old LARPER/Loser Jack Griffith, who didn’t even vote in the election he was protesting. Unmistakably reminds me of the Ur-story instantiated here. “I did help. I sent an election.”

Why don’t I think of gentle mockery more often? It’s so much more effective a response to stupidity than my rage is. Jewish Space Laser Agency: We didn’t start the fire – The Forward

The reason why cancel culture has alarmed so many Americans is not because, say, Holocaust deniers face public shame or white supremacists can’t find jobs on network television. It’s because even normal political disagreement has generated extreme, punitive backlash. It’s because intolerant partisans try to treat mainstream dissent as the equivalent of Holocaust denial or white supremacy.

David French, Can We Have (Another) Conversation About Cancel Culture?

James Dobson … is now telling his followers that the outcome of the presidential election remains “unresolved.”

“Sadly, the highest court in the land didn’t review a word of the overwhelming volume of evidence,” wrote the 84-year-old Dobson, whose former employee, Jenna Ellis, was a member of Rudolph Giuliani’s “crack legal team” that sought to overturn election results in dozens of unsuccessful cases.

In the months since the election, the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family has regularly provided election skeptics with plentiful ammunition and has embraced men and women in Congress who voted to overturn state election results. Meanwhile, Focus’s partner organization in Washington, D.C., the Family Research Council, continues to claim the election was stolen, and that Antifa—not Trump supporters—caused the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. (There is no evidence to suggest Antifa led the attack, while FBI investigations have linked several militia and far-right extremist groups to the violence.)

… Before the election, Focus, Dobson and their numerous affiliated organizations promoted Trump. After the election, these organizations have promoted unfounded claims of election fraud. And after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, they’ve remained silent about the politicians they’ve endorsed who participated in or incited the insurrectionist mob.

…

While Christianity teaches that all people sin and fall short of the glory of God, The Daily Citizen promotes heresy: only liberals sin. Reports about Democrats violating their own COVID restrictions (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Governor Gavin Newsom) are a regular feature. Only libs engage in political violence (“12-Year-Old Boy Assaulted by Woman for Pro-Trump Sign, Police Say”).

Steve Rabey, How evangelical media ministry Focus on the Family fueled lies and insurrectionists.

I have quibbled about whether flakes like Paula White qualify as “evangelical.” There is no quibbling about James Dobson: he’s as mainstream evangelical as they come. His bearing of false witness about the election is very wicked.

While pundits (myself included) have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past four years gravely pondering what Republican politics would look like post-Trump, these members of the House GOP [Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene] have given us what now looks to be the most plausible answer. Rather than a smarter, more responsible vehicle for enacting a set of distinctively Trumpian policies on trade, immigration, and foreign policy, let alone a reversion to the pre-Trump status quo (Romney-Ryan 2.0), we’re going to get a politics of bilious, lizard-brained idiocy along with intentionally cultivated and playacted outrage.

…

It’s certainly newsworthy when a just-elected congresswoman says something bizarre. But is it still newsworthy the 10th time she does it? Or the 100th? Maybe it is in the sense that it will generate strong ratings and give on-air talent something sensational to talk about. Is it really telling people anything new? Anything they need to know? I don’t see how.

What it does, far more, is give a powerful megaphone to someone who above all else craves national attention for her obsessions and derangements. In this respect, news organizations that place Greene and others like her at the center of the news cycle are being played. By incentivizing the madness, rendering it a sure path to national fame and notoriety, they play a new and pernicious role in the political ecosystem — as unintended facilitators of fascism, American style.

If the media and the leadership of both political parties really wanted to cut Greene down to size, they would deprive her of what she wants and needs most of all: our attention.

Damon Linker, Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting exactly what she wants

If Donald Trump was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Josh Hawley is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s Apprentice. They have summoned and unleashed dark forces.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here or join me and others on micro.blog. You won’t find me on Facebook any more, and I don’t post on Twitter (though I do have an account for occasional gawking).

Inauguration Day

At noon today, to my extreme delight, the abominable and detestable Donald Trump was finally deprived of the White House (he actually left earlier) and the symbolic and substantive accoutrements thereof (which he retained until noon).

I am less delighted that the price we pay for that is Joe Biden.

But to my countrymen who are Democrats: Thanks. You surely could have done much worse than Biden from the perspective of an observant Orthodox Christian who still, reflexively and by conviction, leans conservative, especially on cultural issues.

Over the next four years, I will criticize Biden, and if Kamala Harris plays an active role, I’m likely to more harshly criticize her (based on her track record, which I assume reflects her actual convictions and wasn’t just pandering a bit to the California Left). But I will remember the alternative, too.

I hope that the Republicans don’t engage in obstructionism to pander to their own bane, a substantial number of Flight 93/MAGA/QAnon ideologues who profess the sheer evil of all things Democrat. The nation needs massive cooperation across the aisles from those (few? many?) of good will in both major parties.

Let’s leave it there and enjoy today’s celebrations.

Wherein Tipsy Repents his snarkiness about “Evangelicals”

As a highly distilled stage-setting, I left the Evangelicalism in which I was raised 40-45 years ago and left my Evangelical-adjacent Calvinist Church 23 years ago.

Still, I thought my reading was broad enough that I had a pretty good handle on American Evangelicalism. When I didn’t recognize names of people identified as Evangelical leaders, I chalked it up to the passage of the decades, with inevitable deaths, apostasies, new arrivals and such.

But Julia Duin, one of our very top religion reporters, has convinced me: I really should STFU (if you know what I mean). I really should have stopped generalizing about Evangelicals quite a long time ago, because folks I never considered full-fledged Evangelicals — the charismatics/pentecostals — are typically being lumped in with other Evangelicals in mainstream media stories.

That’s a big deal, and I didn’t know it. I don’t know anything about any of their leaders with the possible exception of the odious Pat Robertson, who I think is more-or-less in their camp. Not only that, but the charismatics/pentecostals are becoming increasingly delusional and authoritarian. They no longer just believe that some people have the “gift of prophesy,” but they posit that some have the “Office of Prophet,” and that other Christians are obliged to heed them. There’s blanket name for this stuff: “New Apostolic Reformation,” which is established enough to have the shorthand NAR.

Now I flirted briefly with charismatic Christianity in the late 60s (i.e., attended an Assemblies of God Church a lot during one summer break and rejected an overture to become a Campus Crusade for Christ staffer because Crusade forbade glossolalia), but while I liked some of the people in it, I never bought the doctrines and practices that accompanied them. I then considered them at best equivocally Evangelical, with the caveat that Evangelical is deucedly hard to define or delimit.

But as for the NAR and their supposed Prophets: screw them. I don’t care if they’ve gotten some things right. They’ve also gotten a lot of things wrong (starting around 1054 A.D., but that’s a very long story about the spiritual ancestors of maybe 98% of American Christians) including last Saturday’s “Jericho March” in D.C.

How can I say the Jericho March was wrong? Setting aside countless other indicia, it was a “Christian” rally that featured the bottomest of the bottom-feeders — a humanoid whose very name beslimes all advocates of robustly free speech — Alex Jones of Infowars, who waved his meaty arms and bellowed stuff about “King Jesus.”

Q.E.D.

I do not believe that we have Apostles or Prophets in the uppercase sense today. I’m inclined to mark those who insist we do as sub-Christian cultists, and I certainly refuse to follow any Tom, Dick, Harry or Paula White just because they say they’re an Apostle or a Prophet and God told them something-or-other. And I dare say a lot of non-charismatic/non-pentecostal Evangelicals agree with me.

So I hereby retract every exasperated generalization I’ve made about Evangelicals over the last 23 year. I can’t count them or track them all down, so I can’t say I repudiate them, but they were presumptuous and unreliable.

I won’t go prattling on, but I will give my highest recommendation to the two stories by Julia Duin that convinced me that I didn’t know what I was talking about when talking about “Evangelicals”:

Saturday’s Jericho March, distilled:

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more. what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

E. E. Cummings – Next to of course god america i | Genius

Trumpist alternative facts don’t lead me where they want me to go

Let’s take Trump’s claims seriously, just for the sake of argument. I don’t think my conclusion is his conclusion.

As I understand it, in this alternate world, Team Biden:

secretly organized a huge, multi-state conspiracy,
consisting of Republicans, Democrats, virtually every pollster and presumably a few Libertarians and independents,
including Governors, Secretaries of State, County and City officials, volunteers who help with elections, and
including federal and state judges at trial and appellate levels,
including Trump appointees, both trial and appellate (who Trump boasted would reliably do his will),
without any leaks or defections, and
without leaving a trace of articulable evidence (other than statistical sophistry that competent authorities demolish).

Whew!

Team Trump, in contrast, succeeded in four years at:

picking names off a list of prime judicial nominees handed to him by the Federalist Society and then letting Cocaine Mitch work his bright magic
mis-managing a pandemic response at the cost of scores- or hundreds-of-thousands of lives
implementing a “no good deed goes unpunished” policy for officials who take too seriously their oaths to uphold the law and Constitution
mean-Tweeting one or two gross of power-hungry Republican dipwads at the federal level into repeatedly and vigorously humping Trump’s leg.

I don’t want to minimize the feral cunning it takes to reduce a lot of ambitious manicured and razor-cut Republican hotshots to abject sycophancy, but apparently all that takes is demonically tireless mean-Tweeting (or threatening to mean-Tweet).

Team Biden’s exploit, in contrast, ipso facto proves that they are prepared to unite and govern a diverse and complicated country, including things that must be done without fanfare or even in secrecy.

It also proves that peaceful resistance to election of Biden is futile, and I’ll be damned (literally) if I’m stupid and evil enough to take up arms for the Orange Toxin.

He’s not known for coherence, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what Team Trump wants me to conclude.

(Reminder: This was an exercise in the eventuality of “alternate facts.” And remember that Conspiracy Theories Are Incompatible With Conservatism.)

Potpourri 11/11/20

Audacious Plaintiff gets aptly smacked down.

If you want privacy, folks, you don’t go to court. You especially don’t go to court with a lurid complaint and then ask for privacy because the defense might be lurid, too.

Against fierce cultural and social pressures, you strive—with the help of grace, your pastors, and each other—to live the Catholic ethic of human love even as you experience same-sex attractions. Your efforts at fidelity bespeak deep faith, a powerful hope, and authentic love.

Living chastely—living what John Paul II called “the integrity of love”—is not easy for anyone in our licentious culture …

… unlike some others, you do not demand that truth bend to desire. With Flannery O’Connor, you know that “the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” …

Just as importantly, you do not treat chastity as an ecclesiastical “policy issue” and you do not lobby within the Church for a change in “policy,” because you know that what is at stake here is truth: a truth that makes for happiness, genuine friendship, and, ultimately, beatitude ….

George Weigel, An Open Letter to the People of “Courage”.

I generally am not a fan of George Weigel, but to patronize First Things is to run into him constantly, and he does occasionally say something I agree with, as he does here. I do not endorse, though, some other parts of the same little piece; specifically, I’m not prepared to exonerate Pope Francis from charges of mischief.

My favorite “spy podcast” is Intelligence Matters. Today’s weekly was probably the best I’ve heard, not about spying so much as strategic intelligence about relations with China.

As Great Britain had to gingerly make room for the United States a century ago, so we may need gingerly to make some room for emergent China. New superpower, old analogies.

The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

The sharpness of the observation isn’t immediately obvious to a lazy read. It fits today’s abandonment of churches by social climbers quite well.

The Centers for Disease Control updated its guidance on masks to indicate that masks protect the individuals wearing them, not just those around them. “Experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2,” the CDC’s website reads. “The prevention benefit of masking is derived from the combination of source control and personal protection for the mask wearer.” The number of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 hit an all-time high yesterday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

The Morning Dispatch

The disparity between the science on face masks and the political posturing about them frustrates me a lot. My common sense tells me they should help. The science seems to say they help, but a lot less than I’d have guessed. One of my scientifically smartest friends is not convinced that they help at all (and, scientist or not, is almost mystical about “face-to-face” encounter. No reductionist he.).

I wear one in many situations that make me look like a liberal (how weird to correlate things so!). I leave it off, even when singing as cantor at Church, if nobody’s within ten feet or so of me and I can sing away from the congregation (except for mask-mandatory liturgies, which we’ve added twice mosthly for the elderly or extra-cautious).

But the pandemic locally is the worst ever. Yesterday’s new-infection rate would have meant almost a third of the county getting Covid within a year if it continued unabated.

Here beginneth political punditry. If you are “soooo done with that”, or “just can’t even”, you may stop reading.

If you’re wondering why so many prominent elected Republicans are standing by TrumpWorld’s increasingly untethered to reality conspiracies about widespread voter fraud and election theft, Burgess Everett offers one explanation in Politico. “The party needs President Donald Trump’s help to clinch two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5 that will determine the fate of the Senate GOP’s majority,” Everett writes. “And accepting the presidential results ahead of Trump, a politician driven by loyalty, could put Republicans at odds with the president and his core supporters amid the must-win elections down South.”

The Morning Dispatch

I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough. “Some things,” as Antonin Scalia said of his friendship with Notorious RBG, “are more important than votes.”

The day after the firing of the secretary of defense who resisted the use of troops against peaceful American protesters is probably not a great time for the secretary of state to joke about a transition to a “second Trump administration.” If he was in fact joking. Welcome to what the Republican party is in 2020—a threat to democratic order.

Mona Charen, There Is No Return to Normalcy – Ethics & Public Policy Center She delivers the goods, too.

[I]t’s … possible to make use of the [Devil] as a metaphor, an idea, treating it as the fanciful creation of culture as it tries to make sense of something real in human experience.

What is this something? It’s more precisely a someone — the kind of person who delights in wreaking havoc, who acts entirely from his own interests, and whose interests are incompatible with received norms, standards, restraints, and laws. Someone who actively seeks to inspire anger and animus, who likes nothing more than provoking conflict all around him, both to create advantages for himself and because pulling everyone around him down to his own ignoble level soothes his nagging worry that someone, somewhere might be more widely admired. This is a person who lives for adulation without regard for whether the glory is earned. The louder the cheers, the better. That’s all that counts. And so the only thing that’s a threat is the prospect of the cheers going silent — of someone else rightfully winning the contest for public approval.

Donald Trump is the demon in American democracy.

…

What makes Trump demonic? One thing above all: His willingness, even eagerness, to do serious, potentially fatal, damage to something beautiful, noble, fragile, and rare, purely to satisfy his own emotional needs. That something is American self-government. Trump can’t accept losing, can’t accept rejection, and savors provoking division. He wants to be a maestro conducting a cacophony of animosities at the center of our national stage because it feeds his insatiable craving for attention and power — and because, I suspect, he delights in pulling everybody else down to his own level.

That is a satanic impulse …

… He’s asserted that the Democrats stole the election without providing a shred of proof in even a single state to back up the incendiary accusation. The result? Seventy percent of Republicans are already prepared to say that the election wasn’t free and fair. Which means they are inclined to believe that the Biden administration is illegitimate even before it starts — because, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina put it on Monday night on Fox News, the Democrats are only able win power by cheating.

Damon Linker has been on a roll. I agree with Trump is a demonic force in American politics completely (except that I am a believing Christian, as Linker used to be, and so believe an an actual Satan).

It bothers me less that 70-some million voted for Trump than that some bitter-ender Christian-adjacent folks (i.e., heretics) believe “stolen election” and the prosperity gospelers’ maniacal insistence that this demonic man is God’s choice for America.

President-elect Joe Biden projected calm on Tuesday despite President Trump’s continued refusal to concede the election. “The fact that they’re not willing to acknowledge we won at this point is not of much consequence for our planning and what we’re able to do between now and January 20,” Biden said. He called Trump’s post-election behavior an “embarrassment,” adding that it “will not help the president’s legacy.”

The Morning Dispatch

That kind of heated rhetoric has just got to stop. I’ll give Biden 50 months to cut it out.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

W.H. Auden

It’s over, and Brian Carroll did not win

What I dared not hope for may happen: Biden in the White House (my preference between the two major parties) with the Senate still in Republican hands. I will not support the QAnon Georgia Republican Senate candidate, but I may try to push David Perdue over the top in the January Georgia runoff.

My struggling local newspaper, always eager for free content that will interest readers, has a panel of Rapid Responders who it periodically polls with rather open-ended questions. One of two this week was “what are your take-aways from this election?” My (50 words or fewer) response, written in a sudden burst of late-night energy:

The median American loathes Donald Trump slightly more than he/she fears The Squad and the rest of the Democrats’ Left.
The Republican Workers Party is an emergent force to be reckoned with.

I stand by both.

The networks have just called the election for Joe Biden. Sic transit gloria MAGA.

…

The (Wall Street) Journal story is pretty incredible … but about what you would expect from a president whose mouth writes checks the rest of him can’t cash. Seriously, how is it that you spend months telling your supporters that you are going to fight this in court if you have to, but then half-ass the legal prep? When the GOP went down to Florida in 2000 to wage legal war in the Bush-Gore contest, they sent the lawyer equivalent of Seal Team Six. Now? The fact that Trump doesn’t take this seriously telegraphs to conservatives how seriously we should take him from now on.

Rod Dreher, MAGA Blues And Bitter Klingers | The American Conservative (emphasis added).

The one person who I won’t give the benefit of the doubt to is Trump himself. He is lying. He anticipated this scenario precisely so he could lie about the election being stolen. For months he told his voters that they should vote on Election Day—and they listened to him. Meanwhile, Biden voters didn’t. That’s why early votes went wildly for Biden and Election Day votes went wildly for Trump. We knew this would happen. We talked about this happening. Trump knew that the early votes would be for Biden. He said in advance that he would claim victory on Election Day if he was ahead before the early votes—which were cast first but counted last in many jurisdictions—were counted. He even telegraphed that he would claim those mail and absentee votes were fraudulent. And lo and behold, that’s precisely what he did. If he actually had the power to “stop the voting”—which really meant “stop the counting”—in those states, he would be guilty of the greatest example of mass voter fraud in American history. He tried—and is still trying—to commit voter fraud, and it is flatly outrageous and disgusting. He’s literally the one trying to steal the election, and—as is so often the case—he’s trying to do it by claiming his enemies are the guilty ones.

I could vent more. But if you can’t see the incredible shame of this series of events by now, you’re part of the problem.

Jonah Goldberg, Mandates, Clowns, Oh My – The G-File (emphasis added).

Just this morning, Nancy Pelosi said that Biden will have a bigger mandate than JFK. This is ridiculous for a bunch of different reasons, which I’ll get to in a second. But my point here is just to note that, having said Trump didn’t have much of a mandate with 306 Electoral College votes makes it much easier for me to say the same thing about Biden. If you went around yammering about how Trump had a massive mandate to do whatever he wanted, denying that Biden has a mandate is just that much harder.

As I’ve been saying to my Trumpy friends throughout the Trump era, think about your answer to the question: “What can the next Democratic president do that you won’t be a hypocrite for criticizing?”
…
The moment he takes the oath of office he will have already fulfilled his core mandate: to not be Donald Trump. His second most obvious mandate will be well on its way to fulfillment the moment he starts taking Anthony Fauci’s phone calls.

After that, everything else is up for negotiation …

Jonah Goldberg, Mandates, Clowns, Oh My – The G-File

Note these names as people never to trust again:

Senator Ted Cruz: “What we’re seeing tonight, what we’ve been seeing the last three days, is outrageous. It is partisan, it is political and it is lawless. We’re seeing this pattern in Democratic city after Democratic city, with the worst in the country right now is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: “You have a group of corrupt people who have absolute contempt for the American people, who believe that we are so spineless, so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for ourselves, that they can steal the presidency … No one should have any doubt: You are watching an effort to steal the presidency of the United States.”

Senator Lindsey Graham: “The allegations of wrongdoing are earth-shattering … So Senate Republicans are going to be briefed by the Trump campaign Saturday, and every Senate Republican and House Republican needs to get on television and tell this story.”

Fox News Hits a Dangerous New Low – The Atlantic

In what must surely be among the most noxious claims printed in recent years by the New York Times, he concludes that, “All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”

Blow’s gross accusation follows “analyses” from several other writers blinded by staring incessantly through the same racial lens. Nikole Hannah-Jones of 1619-Project fame solves her conundrum by deciding that some minorities who support President Trump actually are white while The Root’s Michael Harriot explains that such support is how they become white. Washington Post reporter Eugene Scott says they “support white supremacy” and his colleague Karen Attiah describes them as “going along to get along” with white supremacists as a “survival strategy.” A befuddled Paul Krugman, perhaps looking backward through his binoculars, declares that he has “no idea what the true lessons are.”

Turn the binoculars around, and it is easy to see a realignment of working-class voters, regardless of race, toward the party that expresses an interest in their economic concerns.

…

The idea of conservatives as the vindicator of workers’ interests may sound strange, but only because we have forgotten what conservatism means. The market fundamentalism that we call “conservative,” celebrating growth and markets without concern for their effects on family and community, and trusting that the invisible hand will invariably advance the interests of the nation, is libertarian. Conservatives are moving beyond it. And experience now suggests that, as they do, a broad-based, multi-ethnic coalition of working families could be eager to join them.

Oren Cass, A Multi-Ethnic, Working-Class Conservatism – American Compass

(I made my Rapid Response before I read this, though I was already somewhat familiar with Cass’s thinking.

Bookend 1, a case for not reading or watching news.. Bookend 2, a case, essentially, that today’s news environment causes acedia. Between the two stands sanity.

I could add to these C.S. Lewis, who wrote of modern news as, basically, exceeding our design specifications – a similar very point to the second bookend.

Like my other diets, I broke my news diet during th’illiction, but hope to get back on track.

I suspect Trump is going to file lawsuits so he can blame incompetent lawyers or corrupt judges for his loss instead of admitting it’s on him alone.

Trump Isn’t Going Anywhere
“There is nothing about him that goes gently into the night.”
Peter Nicholas

That threat — that the Trumps would undermine any future presidential candidate who didn’t support them in their hour of need — is only powerful if Trump himself can still draw eyeballs. Without Twitter, without the ability to get live television coverage wherever he goes, that power will be diminished. And without that power, what exactly does Trump have going for him to ensure the loyalty of ambitious Republicans?

The day the world stopped paying attention to Donald Trump

Peter Nicholas seems right, Joel Mathis too hopeful. The media have made millions if not billions off Trump, and are unlikely to un-person him if there’s more to be made.

But:

A Twitter account belonging to President Donald Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was permanently suspended late Thursday after he suggested Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded for failing to adequately back Trump.

USA Today

Bannon actually said some thoughtful things in the distant past. His loss to the fever swamps, of which he was a builder, is a shame.

Blogging note: For years, I criticized the GOP for “Zombie Reaganism,” a resort to the Gipper’s tropes in changed times. I even created a category for it.

Say whatever else bad you will about Trump, but he was not a Zombie Reaganite, and he quickly suppressed it in the GOP. I haven’t needed that category for years. We’ll see if that holds with the GOP out of the White House.

And finally, one a more timeless topic:

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William Kavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

W.H. Auden

Just desserts

Vice President Mike Pence had better be awfully circumspect about filling the role that the Constitution and its Twenty-Fifth Amendment assign him. Trump will be watching. So long as Trump is conscious, he will not allow it; should he lose consciousness, he will retaliate when and if he recovers.

… He refused and forbade the most basic safety precautions in the close quarters of the West Wing and on Air Force One, except for testing, which was intended to protect him personally. On Tuesday, Trump was on the debate stage mocking former Vice President Joe Biden for wearing face masks; as the positive tests came in, he did not bother to inform Biden or his team that Trump had exposed him to the coronavirus. Until we know the date of Trump’s last negative COVID-19 test, we can only guess at the number of people he exposed. By sticking to an aggressive travel schedule with in-person gatherings while eschewing even minimal safeguards, Trump has carried the risk of disease across the country.

What you can expect is a lot of victimhood and self-pity. Trump and those around him have always demanded for themselves the decencies that they refuse others. They will get them, too. Trump’s opponents will express concern and good wishes—and if they do not, Trump’s allies will complain that those opponents are allowing politics to overwhelm human feeling. It was only three days ago that Trump on a debate stage dismissed Biden’s dead son, Beau, and falsely claimed that Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, had been dishonorably discharged from the military. The next day, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., appeared on Glenn Beck’s show to describe Hunter as a “crackhead.” Now, though, we will hear a lot about how people are not being respectful enough to a president in his time of illness.

Trump has all his life posed a moral puzzle: What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? Don’t we prove to them that they belong to some unique bracket of humanity, entitled to kick others when they are writhing on the floor, and then to claim mercy when their own crimes and cruelties cast them upon the floor themselves?

David Frum, What Did You Expect of Donald Trump? – The Atlantic

Like all tyrants, Trump lives in an alternate universe where his will, tempered only by his whim, determines everything. And like all tyrants, Trump will eventually be defeated by the distance between his universe and the real one. The question has always been how long that would take, and how much damage would be done in the process. But the toll has been piling up of late. 205,000 dead, a stalled economy, a broken constitution, a bankrupt treasury, a ravaged environment, and the most toxic political culture in memory have not, exactly, made America great “again”. And, with his tax returns now public, the reality that Trump is a failed businessman and tax dodger is as inescapable as the truth that he is a serial sexual abuser.

…

The one simple thing I learned from being diagnosed as positive with a lethal virus decades ago is that I am not in control, and that maturity subsists in acceptance of this. A life well lived is not in denial of reality, but in difficult, unsatisfying, daily, hourly engagement with it, alongside a spiritual attempt at occasional transcendence. Similarly, it seems to me, politics is best conducted as a tackling of the world as it is, free from delusion and ideology, wary of our own bias and wants, humble in our goals, prudent in our methods. It is not a show, let alone a psychotic melodrama about a deranged narcissist.

Andrew Sullivan, Reality Ends The Reality Show – The Weekly Dish

Persuasion:
What is schadenfreude?

Watt Smith:
Thinkers like William James in the 19th century thought a lot about why we might enjoy seeing someone else suffer in a visceral, bloody way. He thought it was an evolutionary throwback to our more violent past, a glitch. But that is not quite what is at stake with the Trump situation. It’s not that you’re enjoying seeing someone suffer in a random way. And it’s not that you’re enjoying a moment of slapstick. It comes down to this question of justice and just desserts.
From research in psychology and neuroscience, there is a lot of evidence that we get a pleasurable kick from seeing justice done.

Is It Wicked to Feel Glee Because the President Is Sick? – Persuasion

Return of the potpourri

1

Yet another unanswerable survey:

Do you think voting by mail is more or less likely to be accurate than in-person?

Axios-SurveyMonkey poll

What do they mean by “accurate”? E.g., reflecting (1) each actual voter’s choice, or (2) aggregate registered voters’ overall preference?

2

Are we really going to waste time listening to theme and variations on whether Kamala Harris is “really an African American“?

3

[T]here’s never been a great American political novel. The average French streetwalker in a novel by Zola knows more about politics than the heroes of the greatest American novels.
In the 1970s, the old Mainline Protestantism starts to break down. A question of what might replace its centrality in American culture emerges. There is a period in the 1990s and 2000s when it seems that Catholicism might provide the moral language that Mainline Protestantism no longer did. In the event, that project failed, primarily because liberal Protestantism did not disappear – it just shifted into post-Protestantism.
Walter Rauschenbusch [an American theologian and a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries] lists six species of social sin. If you go through the list, they are exactly what radicals are objecting to now: bigotry, the ignorance of the uneducated, power, corruption, militarism and oppression. It lines up so perfectly with today’s agitation.
It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.
The trouble is that, unlike Original Sin, there’s no salvation from white guilt. But the formal structure of white guilt and Original Sin is the same. How do you come to understand that you need salvation? By deeper and deeper appreciation of your sinfulness.
The line that I use is that, if you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion.
[T]he young members of the Elect are winning against the old elite. Young staffers at the New York Times forced James Bennett, the editorial page editor, to resign. And that’s incredible. Every old newspaper editor I knew – in generations before mine – would have looked at a letter signed by hundreds of junior staffers criticising an editorial decision, and said ‘I’m sorry that you’re quitting’.

…

Collins: You refer to the post-Protestants who promote these ideas as the ‘Elect’. From a sociological perspective, why do you prefer to use the term ‘Elect’ rather than say the ‘elite’ or another designation?

Bottum: Ross Douthat, in a column in the New York Times, said that one of the things we need to take from An Anxious Age is the distinction between the elite and the Elect. I chose the term Elect because those people who are part of it are not elite in the sense of having a hundred billion dollars. They are not the elite in the sense of being political figures with lengthy careers, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden for that matter. They are not elite in the sense they control things in terms of ownership. So we need another term for them. They certainly have elite educations, but that elite education is not translated into the enormous wealth and power that the true elite has. I could have gone with a class analysis, and I do talk about Milovan Djilas’ analysis in The New Class, which is a fundamental book from the 1950s. There’s also the managerial class analysis that dominated American sociology for many years, and is still really informative. But I wanted to push in a slightly different direction.

…

Race is the problem that we have never solved in this country. After the Reconstruction era, in the aftermath of the Civil War, we lost the national will for solving the problem of race. Segregation was evil, second only to slavery, but not by much. And the Great Society welfare state of the 1960s has manifestly proven a failure. So, we have never solved this problem.

What I object to is the idea that deep feeling is going to solve the race problem. Or that absurdly utopian ideas like abolishing the police are going to solve the problem. We don’t live in a utopia, and those ideas are only going to cause more problems. The Elect has not been called upon to be responsible. Its members are simply objecting, and they are objecting for reasons that are at least half, and probably more, emotional. Which is to say, they are only objecting to feel good about themselves. To look at that in any objective way, it’s so irresponsible. All it does is create more unhappiness in the name of your own self-righteousness. This is what I call the self-love of self-hatred. It’s ‘I’m such a sinner and aren’t I wonderful for knowing that I’m a sinner’. The irresponsibility comes because they aren’t governing.

…

Collins: I’ve also noticed a tendency to avoid detailed analysis of economic and social conditions, or concrete policy reforms. Instead, the issue of race after George Floyd is a simple moral denunciation, or a vague reference to ‘systemic racism’. You hear ‘Why do I have to keep explaining this?’, ‘I’m so exhausted’, and so on, as if the issue was beyond debate.

Bottum: Right. But also it’s defining the Church. It’s a way of saying you either have this feeling or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re evil, and if you do, you’re good. Christian theology, and Christian spiritual practice, has dealt with this for millennia. This is the distinction Calvin would make between justification and sanctification. The idea here is that we no longer need to argue it, because any argument of it is engaging with people beyond the pale. They are outside the Church, they are the profane. They are just wrong. What are they wrong about? They are wrong in the central feeling of moral goodness. This is the attempt to get others to shut up.

We are living in the age of the ad hominem. The fundamental way to answer a claim is to say something about the person who said it. Whether it’s a tu quoque, or an abusive ad hominem, or poisoning the well – the ad hominem is a whole genus of different species of fallacy. How do we know others are wrong? They are wrong because some bad people have said it too. Bari Weiss [the former New York Times op-ed editor] must be wrong [about the illiberal environment at the Times], because Ted Cruz forwarded her tweet. That’s a wonderful ad hominem – guilt by association. It’s not about the content of what is said, it’s about the people who said it.

Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle – spiked (Joseph Bottum interview)

My old friend Jody Bottum thinks that the various Woke movements amount to a kind of post-Protestantism. I think this is wholly wrong. Wokeness is aspirationally Roman Catholic in its structure. It already has:

magisterial teaching that one must hold de fide in order to belong

the pronouncing of anathemas upon those who dissent from that magisterial teaching

a distributed Inquisition devoted to unearthing and prosecuting heresy

an ever-growing Index of Prohibited Books

Wokeness despises the fissiparousness of Protestantism and wants to replace it with Real, Substantial, and Visible Unity under its banner. It’s basically a secularized Counter-Reformation.

Alan Jacobs, wokeness as Counter-Reformation – Snakes and Ladders

On wokeness as religion, see also Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice – Areo (long read – I skimmed)

4

The trouble with Evangelicals is that too often we’ve been wise as doves and innocent as serpents.

Alan Jacobs, paraphrasing Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll’s book is 25 years old, but somehow this aphorism seems truer than ever.

5

Are these trustworthy people to think with?

Alan Jacobs, suggesting a key life question (shortly after reflecting on C.S. Lewis’s Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane). If you know That Hideous Strength, that should resonate.

6

Incompetent narcissist is a really hard sell.

The Remnant, on the 2020 election as a referendum on President Trump, who is neither a competent narcissist nor a lovable bumbler.

7

Nobody wants to be on Team Lesser Evil. You want to feel like you’re on Team Good. (David French, guest-hosting on The Remnant. When you vote Lesser Evil, you’re emotionally joining the team.

8

[O]n June 22nd, the president suspended the arrival of new au pairs … Wealthier families … have begun poaching au pairs from households with lower incomes.

Au-pair wars – America’s au-pair programme is under assault from Donald Trump and the left | United States | The Economist

9

Recommended: The end of secularism is nigh – UnHerd. I thought the Atlantic’s article on the topic (or should I say on the same two foreign developments?) was inferior.

* * * * *

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Truth-tellers not welcome

Trump Berated Intelligence Chief Over Report Russia Wants Him Re-Elected

President chastised official after staffer informed bipartisan House panel that Moscow might again seek to boost his campaign

WASHINGTON—President Trump lashed out at his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, earlier this month after learning that one of his subordinates had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about Russia’s apparent preference for Mr. Trump in the 2020 presidential contest, people familiar with the matter said.

The Oval Office confrontation occurred after Mr. Trump learned that Shelby Pierson, the top election-security official in Mr. Maguire’s office, delivered information on election interference in a classified hearing before bipartisan members of the House panel, alongside national security officials from other federal agencies, three of the people said.

During that hearing, Ms. Pierson said Russia appeared to favor Mr. Trump over Democratic challengers and might seek to act on that preference, two of the people said, in a move that would reprise Moscow’s efforts during the 2016 election to boost his candidacy.

… The president … expressed his agitation over the substance of what Ms. Pierson told lawmakers about Russia’s possible interest in interfering on his behalf, these people said, with one person describing it as a prolonged and pointed interrogation of Mr. Maguire. Officials from other agencies were also present in the room, these people said.

Mr. Trump on Wednesday said he was replacing Mr. Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral, as acting director of national intelligence with Richard Grenell, the current ambassador to Germany. Mr. Grenell has scant experience with intelligence matters and is viewed by Democrats as an ardent loyalist to the president. Mr. Maguire had been rumored to be in the running to be nominated to the position full-time, and Mr. Trump had praised him publicly during his tenure ….

Dustin Volz, Wall Street Journal (emphasis added)

Firing the acting head of an agency whose sole raison d’être is careful analysis to discern the unvarnished truth for the protection of the country from hostile foreign powers.

This is why it’s — ahem! — scary to have a prickly narcissist (see below for more) living in the White House.

* * * * *

Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship. I stress:—not of God’s existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both “posits” his humanity and fulfills it.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Appendix 1

I appreciate Donald Trump’s judicial appointments and a few other things he has done, but I’m utterly opposed to allowing that hateful, unstable and completely self-serving man to serve as President. Maybe by saying it here, I’ll feel less compelled to fault his multiple daily outrages — mere corroboration of his dark soul and tormented mind — in the body of the blog.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.