Category: Transvaluation of Values

Wednesday, 7/31/24

Weird candidates, glass houses

“Weird” is the new “deplorables”

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity-destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Thomas L. Friedman

Too busy to look in a mirror?

I’m not sure that calling Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” when you’re the party of gender fluidity will connect with voters.

Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press (cartoon from a separate source)

(N.B. Be it remembered that everyone reading this is probably WEIRD)

Self-sabotage

Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”

In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians.

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.

Rod Dreher, A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine. Apropos of the barbarians called forth by our queered culture, see ‌Toxic Masculinity rightly so called in Monday’s blog.

America’s unacknowledged social credit system

“Vague and subjective policies pervade the financial industry,” Jeremy Tedesco told the Federalist Society group. He is the general counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which has itself been labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (ADF once was the institutional home of famously intolerant extremist David French.) “They’ll never tell the customer the real reason they are being debanked. Companies hide behind vague standards, just like government would do if it were regulating speech.”

Tedesco sees the issue as being essentially one of collusion: heavily regulated industries doing the dirty work of government officials who cannot engage in censorship themselves but who can lean on banks and insurance companies and make their lives miserable if they choose.

Kevin D. Williamson, Debanking is Just a Tax on Dissent

Schedule F

How many civil servants could a future President Trump try to fire using a reimplemented Schedule F? Estimates run to somewhere around 50,000. Fukuyama is worth quoting at length on the implications:

It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, The Part of “Project 2025” We’re Sure to See

The low stakes in Election 2024

I figure whoever walks away with Pennsylvania wins the deal; so come first Tuesday in November, I plan on staying up no later than the calling of that state. Either way, it will be a new regime, sending rats like Sullivan and Blinken and Kirby scurrying off to think tanks to plot their return to power. Meanwhile, nothing much will change, despite the label at the top; for weapons of death and destruction have to be shipped, genocide has to be upheld, and money has to be printed, no matter the administration.

Terry Cowan

Lame-Duck Quackery

Biden’s three-pronged proposal to reform the Supreme Court isn’t serious.

  • He didn’t consult with Congress before announcing it, as he would have if he were serious.
  • He proposed no language for the constitutional amendments that would be required were he serious.
  • A constitutional amendment to the effect that Presidents have no (little?) immunity isn’t a matter of Supreme Court reform at all — and will prove deucedly difficult to write if someone tries.

Biden probably is past the point of being able to achieve seriousness; all he’s got left is petulance.

(BTW: Term limits and a binding ethics code are not crazy ideas, but the devil’s in the details on how to “bind” SCOTUS.)

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.

Saturday 5-18-24

Single Father repatriates

For several years, I’ve been reading the blog of Hal Freeman, an American who was living in Russia with his younger Russian wife and their children.

But then his wife, Oksana, died, leaving him a single father in a land whose language he hadn’t mastered. His lack of mastery made daily life difficult, and to an extent left him at the mercy of his late wife’s family. And with them, the clash of cultures, American versus Russian, became a big problem.

So he and his youngest daughter returned to the U.S., leaving some sons in Russia. After a month or so of visiting his U.S. sons from a prior marriage, he posted again, including this touching passage:

It has been very hard moving without a wife. I am not just talking about the help in getting things packed and unpacked. It is hard not having someone so close with whom I can discuss what is going on and what we are going through. I have appealed more than once to C.S. Lewis’ book, “A Grief Observed,” and the analogy he used of a man who had a leg amputated. At first the pain can be sharp and overwhelming when touched. Over time, there is healing. The sharp pain and the extreme sensitivity fades. He learns to get around much easier over time. Nevertheless, when he gets into a car or the bath, he remembers that he is an amputee. 

It has been well over two and a half years since Oksana departed this life. I don’t have those times of sharp, excruciating pain in my soul anymore. I have learned to move on and accept that I am a single father. Yet, the move has made the memory of her departure more difficult again. And, I am facing the reality that at my age and with my rather different circumstances, I probably will never have the joy and contentment of a life companion again. And I can honestly say–and I believe I speak for many others who have lost their spouse–it really isn’t so much about missing what she could do for me. I miss doing things for her. There is great emotional reward in caring for and doing things for the one you love. As someone else who had gone through the grief said to me, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go.”

Life Begins Again in America

Barring simultaneous death in an accident or something, my wife and I face that prospect sooner rather than later, both of us having attained our allotted threescore and ten. She, having kept up roughly four close friendships, probably would cope better than I would.

Transing the gay away

At the risk of being accused of concern-trolling, I’m passing this along because it really does bother me.

[T]he entire category of gay kids has been abolished by, yes, gay groups. Gay kids are now conflated with entirely different groups: children who believe they are the opposite sex, straight kids who call themselves “queer,” an entirely new category of human beings called “nonbinaries,” and a few hundred new “orientations” and “genders” — including eunuchs! All of these kids are now deemed “gender diverse,” essentially living the same “LGBTQIA+” life, defined as being queer and subverting any and all cultural and social norms. Homosexuality? It has effectively evaporated into “gender diversity.”

…

The last thing a gay boy needs to be told is that he might actually be a girl inside — and that might be the source of all his troubles. It’s psychologically brutalizing and scarring.

… It’s the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys. And it is now being deployed by gender theorists as gleefully as it once was by bigots.

… The overwhelming majority of detransitioners are gay men and lesbians who were persuaded they were trans in childhood. In the old days, sorting through these feelings just required growing up — no need to make a decision until you’re an adult — and every decision was reversible. In the age of “affirmation-only” and “gender-affirming care,” all this becomes ever more fraught as kids are required to make a decision against a pubertal clock. And this is not a hypothetical. We know it has happened; we know it is happening. For many gender-dysphoric children, there is no doubt that “gender-affirming care” is literally transing the gay away.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added).

What greater manifestation of “internalized homophobia” could there be than deciding that my attraction toward boys must mean I’m a girl (or vice-versa)? Yet, valorizing this madness has become “progressive” dogma.

Presidential “debates”

The first televised presidential debates were between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. The contrast between them and the last debates between Trump and Biden is striking—and appalling. The 1960 candidates soberly aired their views on issues of the day, differing with one another firmly but in a civil manner. The events were reasoned, mature, and valuable. There were reasons Nixon’s sobriquet was “Tricky Dick” and they were widely known. But on camera in those debates he, from today’s vantage-point, seems almost professorial, measuring his words and tackling serious issues.

Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.

This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive … To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality … Trump’s verbal towel-snapping is extreme—he is now renowned for the ability to entrance an audience while communicating all but nothing of importance.

John McWhorter

I not infrequently post provocative things I may not agree with. This is not one of those posts. There are other ways Biden could have declined “debate” (e.g., “I will not debase the office of the Presidency by engaging with a man under 91 criminal indictments”), but he’s made that harder by getting his Irish up and smack-talking Trump.

Body-snatched?

It seems that the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew and upside-down American flag for as many as several days shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Justice Alito attributes that to his wife’s response to a pissing contest with progressive neighbors.

Nick Cattogio isn’t unequivocally buying that explanation. After a trip into the weeds, he ascends to a higher-level overview:

Our friend David French reminded his readers today of one of Jonah Goldberg’s most famous columns, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers piece from March 2016. It was written just as Trump was locking up the Republican presidential nomination for the first time. The influence of ascendant MAGA populism on conservatives whom he’d known for years wasn’t merely profound, Jonah wrote. It was eerie.

He described the change his way: “Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew … Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to.”

That was eight years ago. By now, every person reading this has had extensive personal experience with the phenomenon he observed. It’s happened again and again, in plain sight.

That experience is inescapable context for the reaction to the Times’ story. Maybe the Alitos are getting a bad rap about the flag. Maybe the justice is prepared to thwart Trump’s unconstitutional ambitions in a second term.

Or maybe another body is on its way to being snatched. Why should the Supreme Court be immune from to an ideological virus that’s convinced right-wingers that vindicating America’s constitutional vision requires empowering Donald Trump?

Until the body-snatcher era ends, no one who shows evidence of having been snatched gets the benefit of the doubt. Not at the bottom of the conservative movement and not at the top either.

Culture war debt forgiveness

You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites. They don’t.

National Review, The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

When theology fails

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me. That may be one great part of what I fear, now that I think of it.

Marilynne Robinson (one of her Gilead novels)

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.

A Family Saturday

Today is an important one in our family’s life. Sunday, too. I wish life weren’t too hectic to figure out how we’re celebrating.

America’s war on traditional cultures

When it comes to culture, America and Western NGOs are global aggressors. For a long time, we’ve been promoting contraception and abortion throughout the world. More recently, we’ve promoted gay rights as well. The U.S. Department of State’s Global Equality Fund, dedicated to advancing LGBT rights, is one among many initiatives, some government sponsored, others carried forward by international organizations. In these and in other ways, progressives in the West are carrying the war on traditional culture to the rest of the world. Reproductive rights, gay rights—they’re the new White Man’s Burden.

R.R. Reno, Global Culture War

I believe this, and it humiliates me as an American.

What could possibly go wrong?

President Biden announced Wednesday the cancellation of $1.2 billion in student loans for about 153,000 borrowers, affecting individuals enrolled in the income-based repayment program called Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) who have been in repayment for 10 years and took out $12,000 or less. “If you qualify, you’ll be hearing from me shortly,” Biden said Wednesday, referring to an email selected borrowers would receive alerting them that their loans had been canceled. “The Biden-Harris Administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions,” a White House fact sheet said.

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

First Joe trolls them, soon (if not already) bad actors will phish them. Has the President no tech-literate advisors?

Four norms to delay children’s immersion in the virtual world

Jon Haidt (I don’t know when he dropped “Jonathan” in favor of “Jon”) has a new book coming out, and he’s on a crusade to curtain children’s a tweens’ suffering from social media:

A theme of the book is that we are stuck in a series of collective action traps, and the only way to break out of them is with collective action, such as coordinating with the parents of your kids’ friends to all agree to give smartphones later (not before high school) and independence earlier (starting in elementary school). We must stop overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online.

…

“How can you do this to our children?” the senators asked, in a variety of ways. The response from the social media executives was usually some version of “But Senator, we spend X billion  dollars each year to create industry-leading tools to find and remove such content.” That phrase, “industry-leading,” was used six times during the hearing; five times by Mark Zuckerberg, and once by Shou Chew from TikTok.

But as I watched the hearing, I kept thinking about how content moderation is to some extent a red herring, a distraction from larger issues. Yes, it must be done and done better, but even if these platforms could someday remove 95% of harmful content, the platforms will still be harmful to kids. The discussion of online harms can’t just be about making an adolescent’s time on Instagram safer, not even 95% safer, because so many of the harms I describe in The Anxious Generation are not caused by bad content. They are caused by a change in the nature of childhood when kids begin to spend many hours each day scrolling, posting, and commenting. Even if Instagram could remove 100% of harmful content and leave only photos of happy girls and young women enjoying their beautiful lives, the effect on adolescent girls would still be devastating from the chronic social comparison, loss of sleep, addiction, perfectionism, and decline of time spent with their real friends in the real world. Even if social media companies currently enjoy protection from lawsuits based on the content that other people have posted (Section 230), they absolutely must be held legally responsible for the hundreds of design choices and marketing strategies they have used to hook tens of millions of children.

… [T]he medium is the message …

This is why two of the four norms I propose for solving our collective action problems are about delaying children’s complete immersion in the virtual world. Here are those four norms:

1) No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)
2) No Social Media Before 16
3) Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)
4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, at an earlier age

Jon Haidt, Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring. This presumably is a public posting since Haidt asked readers to share it. I’m past the child state, but my grandchildren are in the creeps’ targeted group.

Coincidentally, the New York Times has articles here and here that illustrate how stupid parents can be about social media.

Every time I see pre-teen girls tarted up for beauty contests I imagine a mom who needs to be [graphic punishment details omitted]. I didn’t know until now about mom-run tarts-for-pedophiles Instagram accounts.

Dr. Phil, transphobe?

Dr Phil, America’s controversial prime-time TV psychologist, slammed the medical community this week for rushing to put gender-confused children on hormonal therapy or give them reassignment surgery. 

Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Dr Phillip McGraw, 73, said he was shocked that America’s leading child doctor group had endorsed the treatments despite countries like the UK and swathes of Europe restricting them due to fears about long-term side effects. 

He said: ‘It’s interesting they choose words like gender-affirming care. That’s interesting that they call it that but really what they’re talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children.

‘All of the major American medical associations have signed off on this… and I have never seen those organizations sign off on anything with less information as to whether or not it does long-term harm of anything in my life.’

Alexa Lardieri, Dr Phil slams US doctors for performing sex-change surgeries on hundreds of trans children a year during Joe Rogan podcast: ‘It’s a social contagion’

Pere la Chaise

One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own energy and their own genius.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

I’m with Twain. I only regret that I got to Pere la Chaise late in the day, and was run out at closure long before I was satisfied.

A taste.

Henhouse

There is a henhouse of fashion editors who gate-keep and are still living their Sex and the City ‘best life,’ who moved to New York to pursue their dream of being a snob.

Designer Elena Velez

It’s not just “fashion editors.” It’s the Economist, too

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s cantankerous prime minister, will strike a note of triumph in his state-of-the-nation address on Saturday. He always does. Last year he boasted of his Fidesz party’s huge win in the election of 2022. This year he has a tougher job. Two of his party’s bigwigs—Hungary’s president, Katalin Novak, and the former justice minister turned MP, Judit Varga—recently quit over their roles in pardoning an orphanage official who covered up sexual abuse.

That scandal stained Mr Orban’s image as an exponent of Christian values and a hero of the international “national conservative” movement Mr Orban likes to brag about standing up to Brussels. In December the EU let him have €10bn ($10.8bn) in aid it had blocked over his rule-of-law violations. But earlier this month, under pressure, he dropped his veto of EU aid to Ukraine. He has since returned to form, holding up sanctions on Chinese firms that have aided Russia’s war effort. No doubt his audience will lap it up.

The Economist World in Brief for 2/17/24

Multiculturalism

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

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

A realistic precis of realingment

The fact is that over the past few decades, and across Western democracies, we’ve been in the middle of a seismic political realignment — with more-educated voters swinging left and less-educated voters swinging right. This realignment is more about culture and identity than it is about economics.

College-educated voters have tended to congregate in big cities and lead very different lives than voters without a college degree. College-educated voters are also much more likely to focus their attention on cultural issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and they are much more socially liberal than noncollege-educated voters.

David Brooks, The Political Failure of Bidenomics

A local story

My fair county made national news, sort of.

Somehow, we managed to get two wonky Township Trustees, a sensitive position that exists for poor relief. One of them squandered money on nonsense, spa trips, and such. She was recently sentenced on criminal charges.

The other became something of a nomad while insisting that her fixed residence was appropriately local. I thought it wasn’t possible to do the job remotely, but she apparently disagreed.

The prosecutor charged her criminally. She was convicted, but the Court of Appeals and now the state Supreme Court reversed (the Supreme Court’s logic differed from the Court of Appeals; that’s probably why they took it.)

A Quo Warranto action, saith the Supreme Court, might well have succeeded, but not a criminal case for theft when every indication was that the peripatetic Trustee sincerely thought she was doing her job and earning her paycheck. Quo Warranto is kind of obscure, but knowing obscure remedies is part of what we go to law school for.

So an embarrassment for the prosecutor and a win for the Trustee who the prosecutor came at too aggressively. There’s typically no love lost between Prosecutors and private practitioners (like me, though I’ve retired), so I find this a suitable outcome.

Automation

Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Aphorism du jour

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

Louise Perry.

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.

Friday 9/29/23

This is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s death. Alan Jacobs reminds me that it’s also the 50th anniversary of W.H. Auden’s death. I am twice bereaved (though I knew not Auden 50 years ago).

Migration

Orban’s Hungary

I’m not saying that Trump was all bad as president. But even the good things that Trump did were accompanied by a narcissism, a gratuitous aggression and not often with[] a lot of intellectual substance, while Orbán has got about the business of being a successful centre-right leader with a lot more grace and a lot more intellectual heft.

… governments have a duty to their own citizens to maintain the character of the country and not to have the character of the country changed forcibly by outsiders.

… no one has a right to turn up in someone else’s country and demand residency. Now, if they are immediately fleeing serious risks to their lives, yes, they can claim sanctuary. But for them to be genuine refugees, as opposed to would-be illegal migrants, they’ve got to seek sanctuary in the first available place. And the vast majority of those coming into Europe are not seeking sanctuary in the first available place. They aren’t even seeking sanctuary at all, most of them, they’re seeking a better life.

Former Australian PM Tony Abbott

EU

The problem with the migration package is its underlying philosophy; a philosophy of open borders complete with letters of invitation. The message that needs to be sent is that there is no allocation possible; please don’t come. If a country needs a workforce, it must be done through legal channels: embassies, consulates, and cooperation programmes with third countries.

The current policy of burdening countries that do not have any link, current or historical, to the third world is unfair and must stop. We were never part of those decisions, so why should we have any responsibility for it? This is a Central European and a Hungarian position. The EU has enough assets at its disposal to handle this problem, such as the financial instruments, to make agreements with countries outside the EU to stop, not to manage, migration. The attitude towards migration has to change completely. Policy makers must say: No, don’t come here. Everything else is hot air.

…

European voters must be told that economic migration is not a human right; asylum from a war zone is. A country neighboring a war zone should take in refugees, as Hungary has done with Ukraine (1.2 million asylum seekers have already been received since the start of the war). However, it is absurd, legally and morally, to make the same allowance for economic migrants who come from far away lands and have passed through many safe countries.

Judit Varga

Culture

Attempted aphorism

Up until now, we have had more questions than answers. What we’d like is more answers than questions.

A spokesperson for a group suspicious of a government proposal. (The details of the proposal and of the suspicious group aren’t really relevant, are they? The silliness of the attempted aphorism is the real point.)

“Religion” as a tool of oppression

It’s outside the usual narrative of repression by religion, but it’s possibly more pervasive: marginalizing something by assigning it to the category “religion.”

In reality, the amorphous nature of Hinduism is due to the fact that Hinduism originally included all that it means to be Indian, including what modern Westerners divided into religion, politics, economics, and so on. But if Hinduism is what it means to be Indian, then by identifying and isolating a religion called Hinduism, the British were able to marginalize what it means to be Indian. Under British colonization, to be British was to be public; to be Indian was to be private. The very conception of religion was a tool in removing native Indian culture and Indians themselves from the exercise of public power.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Artificial Intelligence is still really dumb

Thanks to Jacob Mchangama, I learned that Bing Chat and ChatGPT-4 (which use the same underlying software) refuse to answer queries that contain the words “nigger,” “faggot,” “kike,” and likely others as well. This leads to the refusal to talk about Kike Hernandez (might he have been secretly born in Scunthorpe?), but of course it also blocks queries that ask, for instance, about the origin of the word “faggot,” about reviews for my coauthor Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger, and much more. (Queries that use the version with the accent symbol, “Kiké Hernández,” do yield results, and for that matter the query “What is the origin of the slur ‘Kiké’?” explains the origin of the accent-free “kike.” But I take it that few searchers would actually include such diacritical marks in their search.)

Eugene Volokh

I’ll believe that AI is “intelligent” when it can answer serious questions about contentious topics rather than imposing a blanket ban on naughty words.

Censorship from the anti-censors

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Audre Lorde, quoted against the tactics of Christopher Rufo: Nico Perrino, Right-Wing Activist Christopher Rufo Became the One Thing He Claims to Hate

This led me to review my clippings on Rufo, who set my presumption to “distrust” when he spoke about “freezing the brand” of critical race theory and what he intended to do next. It turns out that some decent people think he’s mostly positive. I’m still not convinced. I feel like he’s a ticking time-bomb harboring some terrible secret.

Conspiracy theories

When should one believe a conspiracy theory?

The bottom line is that citizens should believe accounts from properly constituted epistemic authorities rather than theories that either (1) directly conflict with the epistemic authorities or (2) assert knowledge that has yet to be deemed authoritative by the epistemic authorities. A conspiracy theory may be true, but people are not justified in believing it until the appropriate epistemological authorities deem it true. Therefore, well-evidenced conspiracy theories may—should they reach a certain evidentiary bar—provide the grounds for investigation, appeal, and reassessment, but they should not be believed outright.

Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in American Conspiracy Theories (2014), quoted by Paul Christmann, The Monster Discloses Himself, 25.1 Hedgehog Review.

This would work great if only conspiracy theories didn’t so often start with axiomatic distrust of “properly constituted epistemic authorities.”

A specific conspiracy theory

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on Friday accused the Department of Justice of trying to cover up its biases by indicting a Democratic senator.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on federal bribery charges Friday. The indictment accuses Menendez and his wife of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and “luxury vehicle and home furnishings.”

But rather than accept the indictment shows that the Justice Department is actually a neutral entity, Kirk unveiled some convoluted logic to supposedly prove his original belief.

“The way that the fourth branch of government operates is with intentionality. There are no mistakes,” he said on his podcast.

“They’re doing this to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.”

Tori Otten, Right-Wingers Already Have a Wild Conspiracy Theory About Senator Menendez

I note that despite multiple Right-Wingers in the headline, Otten only cited the hack Charlie Kirk, good enough to affiliate with Liberty University but compared to whom Christopher Rufo is a Nobel Laureate.

Preening propagandists

danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list boyd links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why boyd can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored.

…

I sometimes wonder whether this kerfuffle isn’t something of a smokescreen, intended to distract our attention from more serious and troubling attempts at what George Orwell called “the prevention of literature” … You can buy books that some parents have protested; you can’t buy books that, because of political pressure, have never seen the light of day ….

Alan Jacobs

On the supposed superiority of empathy versus sympathy

Etymologically speaking, sympathy was here first. In use since the 16th century, when the Greek syn- (with) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries. Empathy (the “em” means “into”) barged in from the German in the 20th century and gained popularity through its usage in fields like philosophy, aesthetics and psychology. According to my benighted 1989 edition of Webster’s Unabridged, empathy was the more self-centered emotion, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.”

But in more updated lexicons, it’s as if the two words had reversed. Sympathy now implies a hierarchy whereas empathy is the more egalitarian sentiment. Empathy, per Dictionary.com, is “the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts or attitudes of another” while sympathy stands at a haughty, “you poor dear” remove: “the act or state of feeling sorrow or compassion for another.”

…

Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.

Pamela Paul, Have Some Sympathy

Imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a formidable revanchist.

I’ve found that reminding myself that other people also experience imposter syndrome has never been comforting or at all helpful.

Instead, the closest I’ve come to a “cure” is by taking the spotlight off me and trying to focus on the work. This isn’t about who I am, but about something I’m doing. I tell myself: Okay fine, maybe I am a fraud, but the work is real. I have an index card pinned to the wall that says, “The work speaks for itself.”

Robert van Vliet on micro.blog as @rnv.

Domestic Politics

DJT, MoF

What do we mean exactly by “person of faith”? Trump has had a few very good polls this week, and one deeply perplexing one. The majority of Republican voters see Donald J. Trump as a “person of faith,” according to a poll by HarrisX for the Deseret News. In fact, they see him as more religious than Mitt Romney, who definitely wears the Mormon underwear, and Mike Pence, whose faith is so strong it disallows him from looking female baristas in the eye. Trump. . . more faithful. . . than Mitt Romney and Mike Pence. I don’t even mean this as a pro-Pence take (sick), since for me personally, the one thing I like about Trump is how absolutely godless he is. My walnut-sized brain simply cannot grok the idea of Trump as your top Republican of faith. If Trump’s a man of faith, I am a pastor. My only takeaway is that I am deeply, criminally out of touch with Evangelical America. 

Nellie Bowles (or one of her acknowledged helpers)

I was going to comment on this myself, but Bowles beat me to it with something more adequate than “WTF?!” Is this not a genuine proof that much American religion is nuts?

Strive to resist numbness

Some percentage of you surely rolled your eyes when you realized what this newsletter would be about. Another Trump column?

Strive to resist numbness. Because despite all the blather about Biden and Trump being the two most known “known quantities” in politics, we actually don’t know how dangerous and destabilizing Trump might prove to be as his mind bends under the strain of an election and four indictments. Or whether it’ll break entirely once he’s back in power and surrounded by the most obsequious fascist toadies he can find.

I think he’s getting worse.

Nick Cattagio

Intellectuals and Officeholders

This points, I think, to a certain unreality on the American right. The intellectuals (or at least some of them) are nuanced in their thinking, humane in their sensibilities, keen to avoid cruelty and alleviate suffering, and willing to use government (at least sometimes) to attain that end. But the party’s officeholders and the rank-and-file voters who put them there are prone to extremism, indifferent to (and sometimes appear actively to delight in) cruelty and suffering, and unwilling to use government to make anyone’s life any easier.

…

The fact is that GOP voters chose Trump—and they keep choosing him. They liked his coarseness and selfishness, his rage and fear, and his demands for personal fealty and deference. It’s therefore more accurate to say that his own exemplification and affirmation of these qualities have given Republican voters permission to exemplify and affirm these pre-existing qualities in themselves. Trump lets them off the hook. Instead of Michelle Obama exhorting them to go high when their political opponents go low, Trump assures Republican voters that the smart thing (the guarantor of political victory) is always to go as low as possible—which means indulging a temptation toward viciousness that was already there.

This has had the effect of transforming expressions of callousness and aversion to charity from selectively indulged vices into demonstrations of virtue widely admired for their toughness and ruthlessness.

Damon Linker, The Agony of the Pro-Life Intellectual

As I have noted repeatedly, I mentally checked out of the GOP (my state doesn’t register voters by party) in January 2005, but not because I found the party coarse and selfish. I began to suspect that something was more deeply wrong only during Obama administration, when Republican obsessions with bullshit like birth certificates made me suspect racism more overt than I had thought still existed. Then Trump blew the whole thing open when he moved from Birther-in-Chief to Commander-in-Chief.

As I also have noted (or at least implied) repeatedly, I haven’t checked into the Democrat party. My weak and notional party affiliation is with the American Solidarity Party.

And if you think affiliation with a third party is foolish, I’ll note that it’s no more foolish than expecting either of our major parties to embody the values that lead me to the ASP.

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

L. M. Sacasas, Embrace Your Crookedness

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.

The cost of living in a tolerably decent society

I roll my eyes every time I see the conspicuous virtue signaling at coffee shops that fly the rainbow flag, but if I like their coffee, and they treat me nice as a customer, why shouldn’t I be prepared to tolerate that as the cost of living in a tolerably decent, not to say pleasant, society?

This quote comes from one of the usual suspects and expresses my feelings pretty well.

The most intensely-pondered version of my own toleration began last Spring, when the Artistic Director of a chorus I sing in announced our performance season for 2024-24. Our Fall concert was to be an unfamiliar contemporary Oratorio called Considering Matthew Shepard. If you’re unfamiliar with the Matthew Shepard story, here’s a fair synopsis from Wikipedia:

Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.

Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard’s death. Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard’s sexual orientation played as a motive for the crime.

The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney’s defense counsel countered by arguing that he had intended only to rob Shepard but killed him in a rage when Shepard made a sexual advance toward him. McKinney’s girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him. Both McKinney and Henderson were convicted of the murder, and each of them received two consecutive life sentences.

…

A few hours after Shepard was discovered, his friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout began to contact media organizations, claiming that Shepard had been assaulted because he was gay. According to prosecutor Cal Rerucha, “They were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating Matthew Shepard is gay and we don’t want the fact that he is gay to go unnoticed.” Tina Labrie, a close friend of Shepard’s, said “[Boulden and Trout] wanted to make [Matt] a poster child or something for their cause”. Boulden linked the attack to the absence of a Wyoming criminal statute providing for a hate crimes charge.

That ill-founded conclusion (note: I don’t blame the young friends for trying to make sense of the shocking crime) went viral and remains extant to an extent that I call it the Matthew Shepard myth. It’s powerful enough to have led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

But a gay author who investigated concluded that Matt was a methamphetamine dealer who knew his killers, and the murder was a drug transaction gone awry. As noted above the prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. So “the Matthew Shepard myth” is mythical in at least two senses, including the one that connotes falsity. That’s my take.

Now, back to last Spring, when our upcoming season was announced.

I brushed the dust off my priors about the Matthew Shepard myth, looked again, and came to the same conclusion as before: the homophobic hate crime version is probably false. But it’s entrenched, and powerful; it’s Matt’s “Legacy”, and used occasionally as a bludgeon on anyone reticent about supporting the constellation of changes encompassed in the shorthand “the gay rights movement,” as am I.

Apart from that legacy, I’ve no doubt that Considering Matthew Shepard never would have been written. Could I in good conscience sing it?

I found a streaming audio recording of it (by a group the composer directs) and pored over the libretto. I found a pleasant composition with a libretto that paints “an ordinary boy,” the bereavement of his parents, a coy hint that the Jesus he’d come to know in the Episcopal Church had been with him as he hung comatose on the rural fence to which his attackers tied him, and the reality that he’d become a symbol. I found a slightly hyperbolic portrayal of the demonstrators at Matt’s funeral from Westboro Ba***** Church (the demonstrators didn’t literally cry out Kreuzige!). But I did not find the piece propagandistic per se (i.e., in and of itself); any propagandistic effect is contextual, from the reality I noted in the preceding paragraph.

I also thought of a few chorus members who are jewish, one California import who was astonishingly ignorant of the basic Christian story, and of untold numbers who probably had zero Christian commitment of any sort, orthodox or otherwise. These folks have joined in repeatedly in singing masses, passions, Christian oratorios, Christmas carols — the great music of the formerly-Christian West — without complaining that the music would never have been written had the Christian story not taken root. So too their families in the audience.

So I’m singing the Matthew Shepard oratorio, much as I preferentially buy my commercial coffee at a chain famous for pacific northwest progressivism. It seems like the cost of living in a tolerably decent society.

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

May 31, 2023

303 Creative

Lorrie Smith of 303 Creative in Colorado would like to expand her website-design business to wedding websites, but she realizes that she’ll eventually get, and will decline for reasons of conscience, requests for same-sex wedding websites. Colorado antidiscrimination authorities say that’s a no-no. The case is before SCOTUS, awaiting a decision within a month or so.

Hurt Feelings, Conscience, and Freedom

Rick Plasterer, previously unknown to me, lays out some of the social history behind such cases (with an obvious bit of ax-grinding):

Faced with a court intent on protecting freedom of religion and speech, the Left has turned to the claim that civil rights law, and behind it, the Fourteenth Amendment, mandates pro-active government measures to remove social stigma. This is really a very blatant effort to gain what social conservatives have complained about for years, the claim of a right not to be offended.

…

[S]ome research proposes that younger LGBT cohorts seem to be more sensitive to perceived stigmatizing than the older LGBT population. Given the large “snowflake” population in colleges and universities, this is not surprising. As a researcher critical of the consequences of the sexual revolution, Regnerus said he experiences much day-to-day stigma, but has learned to deal with it. The LGBT identifying population can and does deal with it as well. But pro-LGBT stigma research tends to deny “agency on the part of persons. It esteems collective action while implying personal passivity and an externalized locus of control.”

…

But although the claim to “dignitary harm” might be newly raised with LGBT liberation, the claim that there cannot be fundamental differences in society about ultimate things is old. Quoting Jean Jacques Rosseau’s “The Social Contract,” (1762), George observed that “America is stalked by an ancient fear: The creeping suspicion that ‘[i]t is impossible to live with those whom we regard as damned.’”

Rick Plasterer, Hurt Feelings, Conscience, and Freedom – Part 1.

First Amendment protections

One of my heroes, Robert P. George of Princeton, has weighed in on behalf of 303 Creative via an amicus brief:

Although the rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion are distinct and thus receive separate protection under the First Amendment, they are often intertwined. “[M]uch . . . religious speech might be perceived as offensive to some,” because faithful adherence to a religious tradition implies the acceptance of certain claims about objective truth and the concomitant rejection of certain conduct as morally inconsistent with that truth.

… the Supreme Court has consistently affirmed that the First Amendment protects even profoundly offensive forms of expressive conduct. See, e. g., Snyder, 562 U.S., at 447 (First Amendment protects group that picketed a soldier’s funeral bearing signs indicating their belief “that God kills American soldiers as punishment” for national sins); Virginia v. Black, 583 U.S. 343, 347–348 (2003) (affirming the right of the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses at rallies); Johnson, 491 U.S., at 420 (holding a “State’s interest in preserving the [American] flag as a symbol of nationhood and national unity” did not justify a man’s criminal conviction for engaging in protected political expression by burning it). Hence, when a speaker’s message is explicit—as unmistakable in expressive intent as a twenty-five-foot-tall burning cross, for instance, Black, 583 U.S., at 349—it is clearly protected by the First Amendment. But Colorado’s argument would deny protection to far milder forms of speech, such as an artist’s refusal to design a product that promotes a message to which she objects.

The Supreme Court has ruled that “the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades.” McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S. 185, 191 (2014). It would be an absurd jurisprudential result to rule that Ms. Smith could not, however, politely tell a couple that satisfying their request would conflict with her deeply held religious beliefs about marriage, and then direct them to a different service provider, without bringing the full force of Colorado law down upon herself.

…

Even if Ms. Smith’s refusal to provide website design services for same-sex ceremonies is deeply upsetting, her customers’ distress would still not justify coercion, because the dignity of both parties would be at stake. Ms. Smith could just as easily claim that Colorado’s attempt to commandeer her voice inflicts a “dignitary harm” upon her. By using its power to take from Ms. Smith the right to speak and disseminate her ideas in the public square, Colorado’s actions deprive Ms. Smith of “the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect” for her voice.

…

The First Amendment is a default setting against governmental restraints on speech that the State can overcome only with a compelling rationale. Allegations of “dignitary harm,” on their own, do not suffice, particularly when state action to remedy that “harm” only transfers the injury to a different party.

Robert P. George, Brief of Amicus Curiae in 303 Creative v. Elenis (bold added; link is to a PDF).

I added the boldface because the impossibility of avoiding dignitary harm to someone in situations like this is generally overlooked. Instead, Colorado has been deciding the cases based on an unspoken hierarchy of who’s cool and who’s not. Currently, sexual minorities are cool; Christians who believe that no real marriage is being solemnized when both parties are of the same sex (and that lament, not celebration, is in order) are not cool.

I’m pretty confident that SCOTUS is going to correct that, but it may contrive a narrow, niggling way to avoid hitting it head-on in Lorrie Smith’s case.

Other Legalia

Advice to aspiring law students

  1. Law school opens doors
  2. Law school will not turn a Beta into an Alpha
  3. Big student loan debt closes doors. Want to work for the Innocence Project, or Becket Fund or the like? Fuggedaboudit!
  4. Unless you are a lifetime, Alpha, and you can’t imagine life apart from running with the big dogs, don’t take on heavy student debt on the assumption that you’ll have an Alpha job and Alpha compensation.

Items 1 and 3 have been a mantra of mine for several years. Items 2 and 4 just came to me very recently.

Better Late Than Never

The Texas House voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to impeach the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, over accusations of bribery, using his position to enrich himself and a campaign donor, and abuse of public trust. The vote immediately removed Paxton—in his third term as A.G.—from office, pending a trial in the state Senate, where a two-thirds majority of the 31 senators is needed to convict him. If convicted, he would be barred from ever holding office in Texas again. This is the first time since 1917 Texas has impeached a state-wide office-holder.

TMD

Clarence Thomas

If you subscribe, or are lucky enough not to hit the WSJ paywall, do read John C. Danforth, The Clarence Thomas Stories That PBS Refused to Tell

Sexualia

Trans kids

I like Andrew Sullivan’s take on trangenderism matters even better in distilled form:

A longtime reader quits the Dish:

Andrew, I cannot take your obsession with trans kids any longer. There are so many other issues you could be covering in your weekly essay: the debt ceiling, McCarthy’s tenuous leadership, China, baseball’s new rules, climate change, the Pope, and on and on. As the mother of a trans son who was miserable from age 8 on — and the friend of many other parents of trans kids who were miserable or even suicidal (one at age 6) — I cannot bear your ignorance and fear any longer. I will miss the VFYW and the contest.

I’m sorry you feel this way. As I said in the piece: “We should counter hostility and prejudice toward trans people. We should treat gay kids and kids with gender dysphoria with tenderness, care, and love.” But I confess I am obsessed when gay boys are having their heads filled with notions like “you are in the wrong body” if they are behaving like stereotypical girls, and when so many are irreversibly sterilized before they have even had a chance to grow up. Have you read Time to Think?

I’m also against crude bans on transing children. I’d prefer a European compromise whereby these medical experiments on children can continue — but only with carefully screened patients in rigorous clinical trials. But the American medical establishment refuses to acknowledge any concerns at all, and has recently abolished any lower age limit for transing children. They won’t even engage in debate.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Sullivan’s “European compromise,” because I think it is ontologically false that a female can be born in a male body or vice-versa.

But I’m not comfortable with categorical bans, either, because I recognize the reality of gender dysphoria (at levels a tiny fraction of what we’re currently seeing claimed) that in some cases is intractable and disabling. Social transitioning may give some of these unfortunate people adequate relief, but maybe not all of them. But it generally will not be until adulthood that “so intractable it needs medical intervention” becomes clear, and the social policy calculus changes with adults, doesn’t it?

If I’m wrong about that, the European compromise may be the best we’ve got in a screwed-up world.

Selective enforcement

Homosexual sex has been illegal in Uganda since the days of British colonial rule. No one’s been convicted under the statute since independence in 1962, but the rule provides license for routine repression …

TMD

This was essentially the US pattern in the 1960s as well.

It seems to me to be a principle all people of good will should support: there should be no criminal laws that are 99% unenforced, but get trotted out against people who get cross-wise with some prickly official.

Masculine virtues

In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”

That’s right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It’s an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could “genuinely destroy America forever.”

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.” Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s “pro-pedophile.” Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then “you are probably a groomer.”

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

… And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

David French

Of course, we don’t need to pay attention to David French since he’s a particularly notorious groomer who has gone to work for the Devil.

Back to The Flight 93 Election. When it was very fresh, I read it and admired the Chuzpah of daring the right wing to live up to its catastrophism (about the end of America if Hillary was elected) by voting for Trump. I thought the author risked undermining the catastrophism rather than exploiting it — another in a long line of bets I’d have lost by overestimating the American electorate.

Selected dramatis personae

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Mind you, I’m not denying I’m a loser by this vivid definition.

Christianists

Professor [Rémi] Brague observed that even today many Europeans defend and fight for Christian morality because they see Christianity as a set of values rather than a religion. They are, as the professor noted,  Christianists. They uphold the religion’s moral framework but do not believe in Christ. This paradox leads to a major challenge: Christian values, culture, and civilization cannot be sustained if we are cut off from Christ and tradition as the source.

Zsófia Tóth-Bíró, Shaping Europe with Real Values (The European Conservative)

That strikes me as a pretty good use of the term “Christianist” (Lord knows we’ve got plenty of them in the US), and consistent, I think, of how I’ve generally used the term.

Brief foray into politics

Overloading narrative circuits

I would prefer Trump didn’t become President. But if he became president with 40+ percent of the Hispanic vote and 25+ percent of the black vote, it would be a great thing for the country, finally overloading the circuits of the “everything is white supremacy” machine.

Wesley Yang on an ABC News/WaPo poll showing that 27 percent of black Americans would “definitely or probably vote for Trump in 2024.” (Quoted by Andrew Sullivan)

I’m afraid Linker’s right

DeSantis says: Look at all these great policies I’ve enacted!

Trump says: I’ll kick the shit out of your enemies!

And Republican voters may just prefer the latter.

…

Trump is first and foremost the vehicle of a right-wing revenge fantasy. Everything else follows from that.

Damon Linker, The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

R.R. Reno

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

Friday, 2/24/23

It’s our purported son’s 47th birthday. I say “purported” because we clearly are not old enough to have a 47-year-old.

On the other hand, my late cousin Dutch and his wife were grandparents at 35. Hmmm.

Culture

Journalism and informational overload

Asymmetrical ideological inconveniences

For all their anxiety about media gatekeeping, you’re more likely to find news that’s inconvenient for the left in the New York Times than news that’s inconvenient for the right on a conservative website. People who earn a living complaining about collusion between Democrats and liberal journalists had no issue with Trump treating one Fox News host as his “shadow chief of staff” and patching in another via speaker phone to weigh in during Oval Office meetings. The Venn diagram of populist outlets that screech endlessly about media corruption and populist outlets being sued for defamation for lying about the 2020 election is basically a circle.

Nick Cattogio

Bombarded by “Datapoints”

  • The sum of our daily bombardment with information is to overwhelm and deplete our cognitive resources.
  • [F]rom someone’s perspective, we are all conspiracy theorizers now. We are all in the position of holding beliefs, however sure we may be of them, that some non-trivial portion of the population considers not just mistaken but preposterous and paranoid … [or] rather than saying that we are all conspiracy theorizers now, I should say that we are all, from someone’s perspective, cult members now.

L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society

Vindication is maybe a little too sweet

The indispensable journalist Jesse Singal, who has written a great deal about hasty “transitioning” of adolescents presenting with something like gender dysphoria, faced an alarming challenge: the author of part of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s Standard of Care said Singal had misinterpreted what he wrote and had failed to call for confirmation of his interpretation.

Except it turned out that his challenger wasn’t the author. And Singal hadn’t misinterpreted what the real co-authors wrote. And what they wrote is pretty commonsensical. Singal’s defenders rejoiced, perhaps to excess, at his vindication:

Ever since I have started writing about this issue, a subset of genuinely immoral people in academia and media have tried very hard to lie about my writing on this subject and, in some more extreme cases, destroy my reputation with straightforwardly defamatory claims. My work is by no means perfect or above critique, and I’ve made mistakes, but there’s a chasm that’s light years wide between what I’ve written and what a subset of my critics insist on maliciously and performatively pretending I’ve written.

Could anything better symbolize this than an academic popping up to wrongly accuse me of misrepresenting his work, and of not reaching out to him beforehand, only for it to turn out that he didn’t even write the thing he claimed to have written? Over and over, I tweeted at the people who had jumped on the bandwagon against me, demanding deletions and apologies (my batting average wasn’t great on the apologies front). It was not a good use of my time, and of course my lack of grace here certainly didn’t improve the overall Twitter climate on this issue (and so many others): the debate over youth gender medicine really is treated like a team spectator sport rather than a matter requiring humility, nuance, and compassion. My “enemies” were thrilled that I had been humiliated, and they performed the online equivalent of beating up a me-shaped piñata, and then my “allies” were thrilled at the dramatic turnabout and gave Edmiston the same treatment.

I’m certainly not saying that my actions and his were equivalent; he was the aggressor, he publicly launched a false accusation at me, and he badly misrepresented his role working on the WPATH SoC. Rather, I am saying that the hysterical pitch of Twitter exacerbates everything, and that I threw fuel on the fire because I was so tired of years of defamatory bullshit and had finally achieved the sort of nigh-indisputable, 120-decibel vindication I’d often longed for during these profoundly asinine blowups.

It’s quite a tale if you’re interested.

Distraction

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole – by Damon Linker

It’s become quite common among readers of Strauss to recognize that his mature writings (from roughly the early 1940s on) contain two teachings: a morally edifying surface message for public consumption and another, deeper, more subversive teaching fit only for his most careful and discerning readers. This is how Strauss claimed the greatest works in the history of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks on down to the late 19<sup>th</sup> century were written, and it’s now widely assumed the often-elliptical formulations and unresolved paradoxes in his own books and essays point to the same strategy in his own work.

The challenge, as always, is deciphering the hidden, or “esoteric,” teaching and separating it out from the surface, or “exoteric,” message.

Smith, following Canadian author Shadia Drury and others, including Alamariu, suggests that Strauss’ esoteric teaching is, in most respects, indistinguishable from Nietzsche’s: radically inegalitarian, contemptuous toward democracy, thoroughly anti-Christian, and favoring a strict aristocratic hierarchy with Great Philosophers who break violently and gleefully from the restraints of ordinary morality, patriotism, and piety at the tippy-top.

Damon Linker, Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole

Masks

The results are in, and there’s no evidence that mask mandates, alone or in combination with other preventive measures, made any difference in Covid transmission. But the CDC is unbowed:

When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.‌

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

There were people who “knew” masks were useless before evidence warranted their certainty, and we should not hold them up as prophets now. I, for one, went along with the CDC, but fully aware at the time that (a) they were motivated by the demand that “somebody do something!” and (b) there were some reasons (mask filtration data, size of the virus, etc.) to think they were scripting mere hygiene theater.

I sing in one small choir that continues to rehearse and sing masked — for the supposed benefit of the immunocompromised spouse of one singer. Part of me wanted to trumpet these results and demand an end to our masking; part of me wants to just quietly quit the choir at the end of this season; part of me … well, it’s a long story and I don’t want to hold the group up for derision. Moreover, there’s this important qualification:

[T]he analysis does not prove that proper masks, properly worn, had no benefit at an individual level. People may have good personal reasons to wear masks, and they may have the discipline to wear them consistently.

Dang!

(Source: Bret Stephens, who’s discussing a survey by “Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data.”)

It’s Nellie Bowles Day!

It’s Friday (as I write), which means that Nellie Bowles has brought forth another TGIF collection

  • Pfizer is dropping a fellowship that wasn’t open to white or Asian applicants, after civil rights lawyers reminded them that’s super illegal.
  • NPR cutting 10 percent of its staff: The public radio station—that is, in part, taxpayer funded—is losing money and needs to cut staff. I can’t point to an institution that has more fully failed its mission than NPR, which went from fulfilling a genuine public service with news and great stories (I’m thinking of early This American Life) to just another hyper-partisan maker of mush. Tote bags and mush.

And a longer one:

University DEI admins come up with their perfect replacement: Vanderbilt University’s office of diversity issued a statement consoling students about a recent mass shooting at Michigan State. But apparently they are so very busy that they used AI to write it.

Let me back up: last week, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae—who had previously pleaded down a felony charge that would have prevented him from possessing a gun—slaughtered three students, seemingly at random, on Michigan State’s campus.

In response, Vanderbilt’s equity workers released a touching statement about how everyone needs to be kind and inclusive to, I guess, prevent mass shootings by nearby career criminals: “Another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding.” And: “[L]et us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus.” And: “Finally, we must recognize that creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment.” It’s the same nonsensical but warm sentiment said over and over—inclusive (7 times), community (5 times), safe (3)—and it kinda worked!

Except at the bottom of the statement was this sentence: Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023.

People were upset. The university apologized. And yes, you could ask what exactly these bureaucrats are doing all day. But their laziness might also be their genius: replace all university bureaucrats with ChatGPT. Like the discovery of penicillin, sometimes accidents make genius.

The saddest part may be that if Vanderbilt Administrators hadn’t slipped up and included the footer, nobody would have suspected that this wasn’t just more bureaucratic pabulum.

Odd empowerment

…

Not only is the statue not fully human, it is not an attempt to depict a real woman, with the exception of having a collar as a tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Not one historical woman was judged worthy of receiving the honor by [artist Shahzia] Sikander.

The statue has some resemblance to women in its figure, but it is then changed and warped into something nonhuman and nonfemale. Its hair forms horns and the arms become tentacles. The face is void and harsh. The statue clearly plays on Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in which the deity rises from a clamshell, but whereas Venus is the epitome of the feminine form, this one is deliberately smoothed over. It is a depiction of a neutered woman, a woman who must lose and transcend her femininity in order to be empowered.

…

The statue represents two great deceptions foisted upon women in modern society. To be empowered, women must intentionally diminish their femininity and to succeed in life necessitates delaying motherhood and, if necessary, sacrificing one’s own child. Far from empowering, this message treats femininity as inherently lesser than masculinity; it then is a worldview that can never affirm women as women.

…

Sarah Stewart, Value and True Femininity

Pornodynamics

Free-speech defences of porn treat ‘individual choice’ as a static matter than can be controlled by the principle of avoiding harm. The Second Law of Pornodynamics argues that the inexorable consequence of normalising porn will be systemic harm, and as such all porn should be brutally repressed.

…

[T]he sequel to “Porn will always exist” tends to be “and so we should normalise, regulate and contain it”, with the unspoken subtext “… and make money out of it without being socially ostracised.”

Mary Harrington, The Three Laws of Pornodynamics. Don’t overlook “and make money out of it.”

I don’t write much about pornography because, thank God, I rarely think about the harder-core versions (i.e., excluding the soft-core porn that is much of prime-time and "reputable" streaming videos today). I have it on good authority, though, that it’s pandemic, not excluding "good" kids.

Blasphemy, old and new

[I]t’s not possible to have a functioning society without restrictions on speech and actions that violate that society’s sacred values. For without some sacred values, you don’t have a society, just chaos and conflict. This is still understood by those Muslim believers who react with anger (and sometimes worse) when nonbelievers insult the Prophet.

…

[I]f something looks a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And when a movement with an instantly recognisable symbol, a distinctive metaphysics (identity precedes biology, all desire must be celebrated) and a calendar of feast days celebrated by governments, corporations, universities and public bodies acquires the ability to punish those who deface its symbols, the only possible thing you can call it is an emerging faith – one with a tightening grip on institutional power across the West.

…

Of course it remains to be seen whether this faith will prevail, or be replaced by something still newer and stranger. The point is: forget the marketplace of ideas. Forget the secular interregnum. It’s over: even if you personally are still among the number mumbling about civil debate and tolerance, you’re surrounded by a growing array of factions who don’t play by those rules.

Mary Harrington, Blasphemy is dead. Long live blasphemy.

The stars must have aligned

I have no idea what this means, but on Friday Peggy Noonan and David French both published admiring articles about Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise Speech.”

You’re welcome.

Snowbirds

Northerners go to Florida to find happiness and after about thirty-six hours they realize that climate does not solve their problems: even though it’s 75 degrees, they still are themselves and that’s their problem. They feel isolated, their life is purposeless, they believe stuff they know is not true.

Garrison Keillor

Politics

There he goes again

Chuck Schumer once again is backing more extreme Republican primary candidates who he thinks will be easy enough to beat in the general election:

I’m not immune to the pushback that it’s the voters’ faults. Sure. Kind of. If the ads said, “This person is a lunatic and is being backed by the Democrats because that’s how sure they are that he can’t win a general,” I’d be totally on board. If the ads just said, “This person has repeatedly said the 2020 election was stolen,” I’d be pretty close. But that’s not what they say!

“Janel Brandtjen is as conservative as they come,” reads a postcard sent to Republican voters from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which calls her “a conservative pro-Trump Republican.”

The TV ads being run by the presumptive Democratic nominee note that their preferred Republican won an award for being “pro-life legislator of the year” from a state organization.

A candidate who otherwise would have very little funding and low name recognition is suddenly up on television and in every voter’s mailbox as the “conservative pro-Trump Republican.”

I don’t think it’s entirely fair to “blame voters” at that point ….

Sarah Isgur, The Sweep

Kamala Harris is going nowhere

Speaking of the 25th Amendment, there is a part of it with which many Americans are not familiar: If Biden wants to nominate a new secretary of state or a Supreme Court justice, this requires the approval of the Senate—but if the president wishes to choose a new vice president, this requires the approval of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which currently is under Republican control. There are many Democrats who wish to be rid of Vice President Kamala Harris, whom they have rightly judged to be a political liability with no likely political future of her own, but the only way Biden is getting rid of Harris is by dumping her from the ticket and getting reelected in 2024. It is very difficult to imagine House Republicans voting to approve any new vice president Biden might conceivably choose. Mitch McConnell took a lot of heat for running out the clock on Merrick Garland but, far from paying a political price for this, he harvested a bumper crop of political benefits. Kevin McCarthy, who serves at the mercy of a dozen or so howling moonbats, would have no incentive at all to help Biden replace Harris—and with the vice presidency vacant, McCarthy would be second in line to the presidency with only the oldest-ever incumbent between him and the Oval Office. That’s a storyline more appropriate to a political thriller, but it is something to keep in mind if your current Kremlinology tells you Harris is going anywhere.

Biden is stuck with Harris, and Democrats—and the country—are, it seems, stuck with the both of them, however doddering the man in charge of the executive branch of the federal government may be. It is tempting to write that with only a little sensible political calculation, Republicans could put themselves in an unbeatable situation. But if you think the coming election is foolproof, then you don’t know the fools in question.

Kevin D. Williamson

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ejaculation

On Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ejaculation about a Red State/Blue State “divorce”:

Neither political tribe finds much satisfaction in the United States as it actually is and in Americans as they actually are. That is because the United States of America is a real place full of real people rather than an exercise in ideological (more genuinely tribal) wish-fulfillment.

Kevin D. Williamson

As befits Kevin D. Williamson, there’s much more to his column than that bit.

Cowards

[Ted] Cruz and [Josh] Hawley know that what Trump was trying to do was unconstitutional and would, if successful, gut the Constitution and perhaps even democracy. They simply lacked the courage to tell the snowflakes what they don’t want to hear, so instead they lent aid and comfort to the atrocity this week.

Jonah Goldberg, January 8, 2021.

Shorts

Home

Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Rhodes Scholars

… Pete Buttigieg, the man who is proving single-handedly that Rhodes Scholars are overhyped.

Nellie Bowles

And if you eat the yellow snow?

[W]hen you sit down on ice, you get polaroids.

Garrison Keillor

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.

Saturday, 1/7/23

Culture

Jordan Peterson

“The Campaign to Re-Educate Jordan Peterson” reminds me of how little written about Peterson. That isn’t likely to change because I just can’t take the time to get more than a smattering of the Jordan Peterson content available, and I don’t want to write in ignorance.

I like what I’ve heard and read and seen, but I was making my bed before Jordan Peterson was out of diapers, and I don’t personally need his coaching on how to do life. If a lot of younger (mostly-)men find it beneficial, I’m sure they could do far worse than taking advice from him.

In recognition of his influence, though, I pray for him daily.

AI’s limits

I have been an AI skeptic, which extended to Chat GPT. Ezra Klein has a fantastic podcast on the topic, which I haven’t even finished yet.

My fundamental instinct was right: AI is closely akin to bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense that it bears no relationship to truth. What AI does — so far at least if not ever and always — is basically pastiche of things that it has read and stored in its memory banks.

But my skepticism overlooked the harm AI can do. To make a long story short, I don’t think I can ever trust the internet again for important research; it’s too easy for a single AI “clickfarms” to create a web of websites all pointing in the wrong direction, or pointing aimlessly, with alluring headlines and reciprocal hyperlinks to reinforce the bullshit.

And of course our enemies will be using AI in elections to make any Russian interference in the 2016 election negligible in comparison.

Conservatism and Woke Capital

When I see stories about how Indiana’s conservatism makes it hard to recruit and retain tech workers, I detect a PR campaign at work.

Big Business has been a solvent dissolving families and communities for at least a century, and the press increasingly is a lazy accomplice.

Launch credentials

Aaron Renn has moved to Substack, and The Masculinist is no more. I’m not shedding many tears over that, but I endorse this from #48:

I have a three-year-old, and my ambition for him is that he will not have to go to college. I hope that by the time he turns 18, there will be alternative paths for him to launch himself into life without having to spend the time and money that were previously expended to obtain these “launch” credentials.

Let’s be honest, for 95% of people, college is purely about vocational credentialing. They go to college so they can get a good job coming out of it. For most high paying positions today, a college degree is still the price of entry. In some professions, the amount of formal education required to practice is still going up.

But in others it’s changing in the opposite direction. And that change is a good thing, though we need a lot more of it.

Nellie Bowles excerpts

Red-letter day

I almost never agree with Josh Hawley since he re-invented himself as a populist pugilist, but he hit a right note here:

Standing with me is Josh Hawley, who this month encouraged young men to “log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date.”

Nellie Bowles, TGIF. All subsequent Nellie Bowles excerpts from the same January 6 post.

Enforcing a dubious orthodoxy

A new law in California paves the way for doctors to lose their license for “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.” That sort of behavior is now considered “unprofessional conduct.” 

Longtime TGIF readers know my stance, but for all the newcomers: Misinformation and disinformation are real phenomena. But most of the time these days the words are political terms applied to any information a ruling clique doesn’t like. Often, it’s used by progressive journalists who want to see various voices censored on social media. 

In the case of Covid, many, many very real facts were considered mis-and-disinfo. Like: The vaccine does not prevent transmission of Covid. That was considered fake news, verboten. Had this law been in place you would have lost your medical license for saying it. In that case, people saw with their own bodies that, although vaccinated, they were very much coughing. But thanks to this new law that muffles doctors, who knows what we won’t know going forward.

Pretendians

Another fantastically insane fake Native American: I’m beginning to think that any high profile Native American influencer should be assumed to be a white girl with a spray tan. The latest Pretendian, who is quite literally a white girl with a spray tan: Kay LeClaire. A major leader in the Indigenous movement, LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. She was a co-owner of giige, a “Queer and Native American-owned tattoo shop and artist collective in Madison, WI.” She was a community leader-in-Residence at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and was part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force. She has had copious speaking engagements, and she even led a name-change-mob, forcing the local music venue Winnebego to change its name for Indigenous sensitivity (it was named after its street). She sold crafts and clothes, all while pretending to be a Native American (that’s a federal crime, by the way). Obviously she also claims to be Two-Spirit, a sort of nonbinary identification long-practiced in Native cultures. 

She is in fact German, Swedish and French Canadian. An anonymous blogger identified the fraud.

On a related note, it’s a good time to read this article about how the official “Native American” population in the U.S. between the years 2010 and 2020 . . . doubled. Pretty soon every high school senior will be Native American. Little Harrison and Haisley will be touring the Princeton campus like, “why, yes, this is my ancestral feathered headdress, thanks for asking.”

Governors putting immigrants on buses to NYC

Wait . . . now Democrats are busing migrants to New York? Gov. Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, is busing migrants to New York City. And New York mayor Eric Adams is not happy about it, saying: “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation.”

Recall not three months ago, when busing migrants to New York was considered outrageous, potentially human trafficking, worthy of huge splashy headlines and endless features about the suffering these trips were causing. When the buses come from Colorado, surely the response will be the same? Of course not.

I just checked, and there is not a single story on The New York Times homepage right now. Polis describes his busing program to NYC versus the essentially identical Republican busing program to NYC as “night and day.” Because, Polis says: “We are respecting the agency and the desires of migrants who are passing through Colorado. We want to help them reach their final destination, wherever that is.”

You really should subscribe to the Free Press on Substack.

Politics

From earlier in the week:

Wise words

In 1992 [David Letterman] was famously passed over to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show” in favor of Jay Leno. Months passed, Mr. Leno’s ratings wobbled, NBC offered Mr. Letterman a second chance. And even though he was now fielding better offers from other networks and syndicators, he still had to have Carson—it was his dream from childhood to succeed that brilliant performer, have that show. He couldn’t give it up.

His advisers, in the crunch, told him a truth that is said to have released him from his idée fixe. There is no Johnny Carson show anymore, they said, it’s gone. It’s the Jay Leno show now, and you never wanted to inherit that.

Soon after, Mr. Letterman accepted the CBS show where he finally became what he wanted to be, No. 1 in late night.

Sometimes you have to realize a dream is a fixation, its object no longer achievable because it doesn’t exist.

…

Some of the [House Speaker election] spectacle connects in my mind to the fact that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a longtime idea that he must be speaker, and would do anything for it, and left his colleagues thinking eh, he just wants to be speaker—he’s two-faced, believes in little, blows with the wind. So they enjoyed torturing him. And in the end he made the kind of concessions that make a speakership hardly worth having.

This introduced an unusually white-hot Peggy Noonan column, and her no-holds barred take-down of the Freedom Caucus (“stupid,” “highly emotional,” “nihilis[ts],” no “historical depth”) is spot-on.

Remembering January 6

At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”

We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.

Peter Wehner

Hunter Biden

… The House inquiry into Hunter Biden damages him but not his father ….

One of Karl Rove’s predictions for 2023. I have no opinion on most of them, but this one’s spot on, and the obsession of the GOP Congress-in-Waiting (there is no Congress until a Speaker is elected, which hasn’t happened as I write) is contemptible.

Speaker Pelosi

I know Nancy Pelosi was (is?) almost as hated by Republicans as Hillary Clinton. In reaction, I was inclined to praise her effectiveness as Speaker of the House.

But I must admit that her effectiveness was purchased at the cost if further infantilizing our feckless Congress. Pelosi was effective at advancing Democratic goals not purely by management and persuasion. She tended to formulate massive omnibus bills in secret and then introduce them at the last minute before something dreadful like a government shutdown would arrive. Last year’s $1.7 trillion year-end bill was a classic example.

Her sobriquet probably should be “Take It or Leave It Nancy.”

And Kevin McCarthy’s complicity is why at least one House GOP member opposed him.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

It’s Havel’s Greengrocer Month!

SBC’s numbers fetish

“a satanic scheme to distract us from evangelism.”

Augie Boto, Southern Baptist Convention Executive Council general counsel and former vice president, characterizing reports of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist pastors and church employees.

Evangelicalism, of which the SBC is a member in very good standing, had a problem with seeking numerical growth above all else for as long as I was part of it. Psychological trickery and deception were part of the deal (e.g. "Every head bowed and every eye closed. … I see that hand. Is there another?" when nobody had raised a hand.)

The EC’s publishing arm, the Baptist Press, “was also used to portray victims in an unflattering light and mischaracterize allegations of abuse,” according to the report. For example, in 2019 Jennifer Lyell—an abuse survivor and employee of SBC-affiliated Lifeway—was asked to write publicly about her sexual abuse by an SBC seminary professor, but the article was changed before publication to suggest a consensual relationship and only corrected months later.

(Emphasis added)

Hauerwas strikes again

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens.

Not-quite-rank speculation

Maybe Mainline Protestantism is less prone to pervasive sex abuse partly because it has far fewer young people for predators to target. Not many Mainline churches have vibrant youth ministries or large programs for children. But Mainline churches do have a genuine institutional advantage with wider systems of accountability that are likelier to address sexual abuse.

In contrast, most of evangelicalism is effectively congregationalist with fewer authoritative structures beyond the local church. Self protective pastors or congregational governing boards can more easily evade accountability than congregations within denominations. Mainline denominations have bishops, superintendents, presbyteries and synods that oversee congregations and clergy. Often this oversight fails to work effectively, but it can be better than no oversight at all.

Perhaps more importantly, there is culturally less deference toward and trust for clergy and for church governance in Mainline Protestantism. As I recall growing up Methodist, critiquing and tearing down the pastor is often the local church’s most fervent sport, sadly. Preoccupation with pastoral flaws obviously is deeply unhelpful and may help explain part of Mainline Protestantism’s dysfunction. But Mainliners are typically not intimidated by clergy or distorted ideas about pastoral authority.

The typical Mainline cleric is not invested with the spiritual authority that many evangelicals accord their pastors. And of course Catholic priests have more spiritual authority than do Protestant clergy. The reasons are ecclesiological but also maybe sociological. Wealthy Ivy League educated parishioners at an Episcopal parish who belong to country clubs, have many lawyer friends, and know the mayor, are less likely to defer to their cleric or congregational leaders than maybe less culturally privileged members of an evangelical church.

Evangelicals maybe are more prone to idealize their pastors than Mainline Protestants, who are more prone to see clerics as the hired help.

Juicy Ecumenism, ‌Mainliners, Evangelicals, Catholics & Sexual Abuse – Juicy Ecumenism (Italics added)

This seemed timely, but don’t think that I’m siding with the Mainline. I have history in Evangelicalism, and write reactively against it, but I can’t say one way or the other whether the Mainline is healthier overall. I will, however, unequivocally endorse accountability — be it bishops, synods, presbyteries or whatever — over congregationalism, or what I call "fiefdoms."

Also, for what it’s worth, I’m skeptical of the claim I italicized, but it’s been a long time since I spent time around Protestants talking about their pastors.

Gun nuts, pro and con

Respected philosopher James K.A. Smith emotes:

We’ve taken too long. Habitualities built up over a 200 year history will not be undone by tweaks on policy and half measures.

We need the collective will to repeal the 2nd Amendment and confiscate guns.

Only Mammon and our idols prevent us from doing so.

Burn them down.

But Mark Tooley has some cautions:

Christian realism always counsels against ambitious absolutist solutions that override precedent, ignore human nature, and downplay the complex social factors that foster the conditions for catastrophe.

Tooley also has cautions for gun hobbyists, too (and by implication, for us all):

Christianity traditionally argues not only against malevolent violence, of course, but also against vain amusements. The vast, vast majority of gun enthusiasts are mainly devoted hobbyists. For most, their pursuits are benign. But traditional Christianity cautions against unhealthy enthusiasms for worldly hobbies, however benign. This is especially the case where a prurient fascination with guns bleeds over into the macabre.

For more than 2,000 years, Christianity often has preached against theaters, salacious literature, dancing, festivals, bear-baiting, carnivals, card playing, horse racing, and other recreations that many Christians see as mostly harmless in themselves. The argument against passions for such pursuits is that life is short and that Christians are called to redeem the time and be sober, alert, and focused on God’s work.

Life under soft totalitarianism*

If I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to profess. But even if I yelled out a credo when the Eugenists had me on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed quite a week ago.

G.K. Chesterton, The Established Church of Doubt, in The G. K. Chesterton Collection (Kindle Location 19750)

I had to read that a few times to get it when Readwise coughed it up this morning. It’s as true today as when Chesterton wrote it, though the actors have changed:

  • "Conservatives" who abandoned bog standard conservatism for Trumpist populism, but pre-eminently …
  • Wokesters, who positively make a cruel game out of cancelling anyone who still believes, say, that marriage is between a man and a woman (or other offenses again liberal groin pieties or racial identity politics).

* Soft totalitarianism is that totalitarianism that doesn’t command by pointing a gun barrel. Not yet.

Havel’s Greengrocers

Speaking of liberal groin pieties, it’s Pride Month, and more and more restaurants and other businesses are playing Havel’s Greengrocer.

It’s actually kind of nice of them: it tells me who to avoid this June and, conversely, what courageous little dissident shops I might want to patronize.

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.