Category: Damn rackets

Flash! Sex Matters!

Health

Sex matters

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

Via The Morning Dispatch

Judgment Day’s coming

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

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

Journalism

Keeping up appearances

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

The Free Press

Wrinkles to iron out

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

The Free Press

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

Protest

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

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

The Morning Dispatch

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

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

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

Enablers as “basic humanitarian aid”

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

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

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

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

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

Culture

Surveillance Capitalismn

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

Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive

Deschooling

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

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Governmental truth

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

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

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

Reassuring stories

Betrayed again — It hurts so good!

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

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

Dispossession

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

David Brooks, How to Destroy Truth

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

4/30/24

The Surprising Truth About Handmaids

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

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

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

Schrödinger persons

On a related note:

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

Leah Libresco Sargeant

A cautionary tale

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

Chris Arnade

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

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

Aaron Burr = DJT

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

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

POTUS candidate age disparity

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

The Free Press

Presidential immunity

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

Then finally I found sanity:

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

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

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

Sarah Isgur

Nellie’s miscellany

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

Nellie Bowles

(See comment below, which puts )

Wordplay

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

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

dire normalization

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

Xitter

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

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

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Saturday, 4/6/24

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

Meta

America the experiment

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

Barack Obama

No sheaf of papers can protect us

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

…

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

N.S. Lyons, at UnHerd

Luxury beliefs before 2019

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

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

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

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

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

Garrison Keillor

Rackets

EVs

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

Via Dense Discovery Issue 282

Trump looting the GOP

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

Michelle Cottle, Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party

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

Has Leonard Leo turned mercenary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just asking questions

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

Election 2024

Political Therapeutic Deism

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

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

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

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

Michael Wear

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

“But the judges” no longer applies

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Good advice, since abandoned

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

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

Miscellany

Rowling throws down the gauntlet

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

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

The Free Press

Bomb-thrower

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

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

Alan Jacobs, against the factory of unreason

Nellie snippets

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

Nellie Bowles

I’m that guy

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

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

Conservatisms

I’m a David Brooks kind of conservative …

Every once in a while, David Brooks writes something that makes me want to say “I’m a David Brooks kind of conservative.” This was one of those times:

How do you stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole in brutalizing times? How do you prevent yourself from becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized?

Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart.

The ancient Greeks knew about violent times. They lived with frequent wars between city-states, with massacres and mass rape. In response, they adopted a tragic sensibility. This sensibility begins with the awareness that the crust of civilization is thin. Breakdowns into barbarism are the historic norm. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re living in some modern age, too enlightened for hatred to take over.

In these circumstances, everybody has a choice. You can try to avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naïvely wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write centuries later, “Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” And that goes for great women, too.

This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways. First, it teaches a sense of humility …

Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off …

Third, this tragic mentality encourages caution. …

Fourth, the tragic mentality teaches people to be suspicious of their own rage. …

Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. …

So far, I’ve been describing the cool, prudent and humble mentality we learn from the Athenians. Now I turn to a different mentality, a mentality that emerged among the great Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: the act of leading with love in harsh times.

… During a recent Zoom call, someone asked me: Isn’t it dangerous to be vulnerable toward others when there is so much bitterness, betrayal and pain all around? My answer to that good question is: Yes, it is dangerous. But it is also dangerous to be hardened and calloused over by hard times. It is also dangerous, as C.S. Lewis put it, to guard your heart so thoroughly that you make it “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

David Brooks, Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms.

… but I’m not deaf to Wendell Berry conservatism

I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.

This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited by voters for Trump who are “animated most intensely by feelings of racial resentment or male self-pity,” and by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.” Mr. Burns is a political expert, who writes from a posture of authority, but his authority comes from no close acquaintance with rural places or with Trump voters or with people of the working class. He identifies only two reasons rural people might have had for voting for Trump, without asking, for instance, why they might have voted against Clinton or Biden. And he says that working-class voters “feel” victimized, apparently without considering that they may “feel” so because they know so. He might have added that many of them know also that they are disregarded or disdained by another set of elites who think them ignorant because they have not been to college. This is a prejudice, resting upon a cruel and extremely destructive falsehood of the same kind as white supremacy. To be fair, or at least more complete, Mr. Burns might have added to his collection of deplorables the rural voters who vote for Democrats only because the Democrats are not Republicans.

…

Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use. I have not made a “survey,” but I have read enough to know that Alexander Burns’s article is conventional. Like his fellow experts, he appears to assume the inexhaustibility of the non-human world, and likewise the forever availability of the rural and working-class humans who do, well or poorly, the fundamental work of every economy. Like most of his fellow experts, he consents to and takes for granted the corporate destruction of the land and the human communities of rural America.

…

My impression is that the writers of the articles I have read have never ventured into rural America to ask in good faith what the problems are and what might be the remedies. And so I have made a sort of practice also of inviting writers and editors to come here where I live to allow me (and some younger people) to show them what we are up against. So far, nobody has showed up.

Wendell Berry

Trump officials against Trump

The fact of the matter is he is a consummate narcissist and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk. … He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it. … He’s like a 9-year-old, a defiant 9-year-old kid, who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table defying his parents to stop him from doing it.

William Barr, who together with a few other former high officials in Trump’s administration have ruled out voting for him in 2024:

  • Nikki Haley
  • Mike Pence
  • Mike Pompeo
  • John Bolton
  • William Barr
  • Mick Mulvaney
  • Betsy DeVos
  • Dan Coats
  • Rex Tillerson
  • Alex Azar
  • Elaine Chao
  • John Kelly
  • Mark Esper
  • James Mattis
  • H.R. McMaster
  • Richard Spencer
  • Mark Milley

The ubiquitous machine

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

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

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

Sleazy but legal?

Remember this?

I had mixed, but mostly negative, feelings about it at the time. (The positive feelings boiled down to “anyone who doesn’t know you can’t vote by text message is someone I’d prefer not vote anyway.”)

But UCLA libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh opposes the criminal prosecution of the guy who perpetrated this hoax.

Poetry needs to vibrate the air

Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry. Without the sound, the reader looks at the lines as he looks at prose, seeking a meaning. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.

Basil Bunting, “The Poet’s Point of View” via Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

The attention economy rewards shamelessness

In subsequent obscure journal articles, Mr. Goldhaber warned of the attention economy’s destabilizing effects, including how it has disproportionate benefits for the most shameless among us. “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age – The New York Times

The perfect candidate for the attention economy

Former President Donald Trump in a post on Truth Social:

“A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL ‘ROGUE COP’ OR ‘BAD APPLE.’ SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’ ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!”

TMD

“People do these elaborate takes about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and then he just comes out and says the president should be allowed to do infinite crimes,” Matt Yglesias marveled.

Nick Catoggio

Your government scamming you

When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.

For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car.

Until recently, this subsidy was a Washington secret. Carmakers and regulators liked it that way. Regulators could announce what sounded like stringent targets, and carmakers would nod along, knowing they could comply by making electric cars with arbitrarily boosted compliance values. Consumers would unknowingly foot the bill.

The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”

Carmakers have panicked and asked the Biden administration to delay any return to legal or engineering reality. That is understandable. Without the multiplier, the Transportation Department’s proposed rules are completely unattainable. But workable rules don’t require government-created cheat codes. Carmakers should confront that problem head on.

Michael Buschbacher and James Conde, The Electric-Vehicle Cheating Scandal – WSJ

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.

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences. 

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

  • Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
  • Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
  • Culture is more important than politics and economics.
  • A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
  • Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
  • Beauty is more important than efficiency.
  • The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
  • The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

More:

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’s Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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, 12/16/23

The Ivies

The Homer Simpson theory of censorship

By the time I post this, America’s chattering class probably will have moved on to new clickbait [Note: I was wrong about that; they’re still writing about it.], but I thought David French was solid on the Ivy League Presidents’ notorious testimony to Congress:

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students …

[E]ach of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (I served as the group’s president in 2004 and 2005.) So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask: Where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

…

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents. With all due apology to Homer Simpson and his legendary theory of alcohol, it’s as if many campus critics view censorship as the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives, too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups that hold offensive views ….

The Right and Wrong Ways to Deal with Campus Antisemitism

Claudine Gay

[W]hen journalists discovered that [Harvard President Claudine Gay] had plagiarized heavily (even as she published very little before getting the job), Harvard hired a high-powered lawyer to bully those reporters. Several of the academics she plagiarized are not happy about it. And it does bring up questions of her actual credentials here—her biggest success before her appointment as president of Harvard seems to be as part of the mob that tried to smear Roland Fryer, a black professor there who poked some holes in common police racism narratives.

Nellie Bowles

Rhetorical flights of fancy

…

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that a representative survey at Harvard University would show that 51 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 found that the attacks by Hamas can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.

…

Mathias Döpfner, The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7.

This is but one of a list of Döpfner’s “I didn’t want to believes,” but its fallacy smacked me in the face. Isn’t “a representative survey at Harvard University” an oxymoron? Isn’t any survey at Harvard incapable of showing what Americans generally between ages 18 and 24 believe?

I think the author knows that:

And, more than anything else, I didn’t want to believe it was possible that some of the most renowned and influential elite universities in the world would capitulate to the cultural struggle carried out in the name of a woke agenda pushed by students that are increasingly demonstrating a blatantly antisemitic mindset ….

The ongoing treason of the intellectuals

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

Niall Ferguson, The Treason of the Intellectuals

Elites not fit for purpose

Rod Dreher, who went to LSU instead of an Ivy League school, has a more “meta” view of the débâcle:

What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose.

Dispossession

Stewardship as affront

Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack of stewardship that is the ethical core of a throwaway society, the visible presence of old cars represents quite the opposite. Yet these are easily conflated under the environmentalist aesthetic, and the result has been to impart a heightened moral status to Americans’ prejudice against the old, now dignified as an expression of civic responsibility.

…

Among the sacrifices demanded by the new gods may be your ten year old car that gets 35 MPG, requires zero new manufacturing (with its associated environmental costs), and may be good for another ten years. As Rene Girard points out, ritual violence is usually directed against a scapegoat who is in fact innocent, onto whom the sins of the community are transferred. In our pagan society of progress, it seems anything old and serviceable can serve this role.

Matthew B. Crawford.

I find it affirming that between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, Alan Jacobs posted the exact same selections from Crawford’s essay.

Chastity as atavism

Even many places that are inclined to be chill about private acts between adults balk at how far America is taking things. In America, tens of thousands of people cut off their breasts or genitals every year trying to change their sex. Judges tell parents they will lose custody if they don’t let their children be castrated. Rising STD rates among gay men have led the CDC to approve the continuous use of antibiotics as a prophylactic (DoxyPEP), even though this will surely result in antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Our birthrates are collapsing, and almost half of the children we do have are out of wedlock. There are lots of reasons other countries might look at us and think maybe we don’t have our sexual norms exactly right.

Helen Andrews via Rod Dreher

But leave a scrap

You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Miscellany

The New York Times

[T]he Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

James Bennet, former New York Times Opinion Editor, in the Economist. This is a 16,000-word essay on what has gone wrong at the Times — and how it went wrong.

A big factor is the intrinsic incentives of modern narrowcasting. The New York Times is prospering immensely, after a near-death experience, but it is prospering by telling liberals and progressives what they want to hear while pretending that it’s still an honest, unbiased source. So profitable is the new scam that the Times is unlikely to repent and go back to the old ways.

My decision to skip the Times “news” coverage and go straight to the Opinion pages — where I know I’m getting opinion and am unseduced by it — is vindicated.

Sundry madness

  • Barbara Furlow-Smiles, the woman whose title was Lead Strategist, Global Head of Employee Resource Groups and Diversity Engagement (i.e., head of DEI) at Facebook, pleaded guilty this week to defrauding the company of $4 million. A perfect symbol of these programs that literally the leader of it was very, very busy coming up with ways to steal millions from Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes it was just simple: she had Facebook pay $18,000 to a preschool for tuition, which, I love that, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. Other times, her scams were more elaborate. She hired friends for fake jobs and had them pay her kickbacks (dream of dreams). She submitted fake expense reports and such (oldie but goody). The kickbacks often came in cash, sometimes wrapped in t-shirts, according to the Feds (secure).
  • The Biden administration has decided to go after a random moving company for the crime of hiring too many muscular young men. Yes, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Meathead Movers, alleging age discrimination. There was no complaint that kicked this off, no elderly man who was turned out. The EEOC just decided to bankrupt this random company. The investigation started in 2017, but September 2023 was the moment to strike. Six years of investigating Meathead Movers. Maybe the CEO didn’t tweet enough nice things about Kamala Harris. Who knows. But moving companies beware: Are you hiring strong young men to carry things? Illegal! Go to a retirement home, find the tiniest elderly lady, and force her to haul a piano. That’s justice. That’s the EEOC. No one tell them about the NBA. 

Nellie Bowles

School as Industry

Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Counterculture

Lately to be countercultural is to be apophatic: untattooed, unbranded, unvideoed, unwebbed, uncontroversial, no takes, and genuinely nice to people.

@Jonah

Bill Bryson describes cricket.

Politics

Trump II

The warning Cheney issues is clear and persuasive: A second presidential term for Donald Trump would pose great risks to the nation’s democratic practices and identity. A retribution-minded, Constitution-terminating leader buttressed by unscrupulous advisers and ethically impaired lawyers could, she argues, “dismantle our republic.” As both a witness and a target of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and as a leader of the House committee that investigated the attack, Cheney recognizes the power of the mob that Trump commands. She also understands the cowardice of his enablers in the Republican Party, the same kind of loyalists who would populate — or at least seek to justify — a second Trump administration.

Carlos Lozado

Vivek!

I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.

Frank Bruni. Bruni also gives a shout-out to Sarah Isgur:

  • [I]n The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’”

The funny thing is, Isgur did not say that. What she said was “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘asshole.’” The Times censored it.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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, 12/9/23

I hope I’ll have enough voice to sing this evening’s Lafayette Chamber Singers concert, Pastyme With Good Companye. I’ve been fighting a cold since Tuesday.

Culture

Pizzagate is nothing new

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.

Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great

The inquisitive spirit

I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.

…

If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.

Agnes Callard. These are but a few snippets from a rich article defending the humanities, though the author cannot tell you the “value” of them.

Seeing obscurely

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears.

Maria Popova, introducing a review of In the Dark

The Apostle Paul said substantially the same thing, of course.

Science and intuition

Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order—the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality—has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word ‘intellectuality’ the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the ‘rationalist’ error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

Terror Profiteers

We’re had war profiteers for a very long time. Now we have terrorism profiteers:

Money from terror: Is it possible that Hamas terrorists made a profit on the October 7 massacre? It is. On Monday, two law professors, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of NYU and Joshua Mitts of Columbia, released the draft of a paper that makes the case. There was “a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company EFT [exchange traded fund] days before the October 7 Hamas attack. . . . Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv,” they write. Translation? There were people who, knowing the attack was coming, bet that the stocks of Israeli companies would fall. (H/T Joe Nocera for this guest item.)

Nellie Bowles

Politics

Apocalypse

In The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 special issue, 24 writers imagine what a second Trump term would look like.

After noticing that the top X articles on the Atlantic webpage Monday were about how horrible a second Trump term would be, I noted they were all from a January/February 2024 “special issue, and that the block-quote was the banner at the top of the page.

How do we deal with Trump? Indictments boost him. An Atlantic special issue full of warnings (probably ranging from sober to highly speculative) may add as much support as it peels off. Yet how dare we remain mute?

I said when Trump won in 2016 that it marked a major political realignment. I think I underestimated it.

The extent of support for Donald Trump strikes me as an apocalypse:

“Apocalypse” has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.

(Wikipedia) You could also say “unveiling.” That’s why I say that support for him is an apocalypse, not (just) that a second term would be a catastrophe.

What that apocalypse reveals, I’m starting to think, is that roughly half of Americans are finished with liberal democracy and want a populist strong man. And I suspect that half would say, in essence, “Why shouldn’t we be finished with it? That procedural fetish has not done well for me and mine.”

It might be prudent to “shut up and keep your head down,” but that’s never been advice I was inclined to take.

Reform the Insurrection Act!

The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.

…

When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.

Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford.

David French

Novelty Cons

George Santos was, for now at least, the ultimate Novelty Con:

I’m a college-educated white woman/black man/gay man/Latina/[some combination of the previous] under 40, and I am ready to repeat today’s GOP talking points!” That is the entire value proposition, but it works.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson continues:

Republicans have long been starved for novelty. From its founding in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 until 2016, the Republican Party was fundamentally the same thing the whole time: the party of heartland businessmen’s conservatism. …

There is a kind of devolutionary force at work among the Novelty Cons. Ann Coulter may play a crazy person on television, but she is smart and did real work as a real lawyer before she started doing … whatever it is she does now. Ben Carson is a brain surgeon. Michael Steele didn’t just wander in off the street and get made head of the Republican National Committee. 

George Santos, on the other hand, is pretty much a guy who wandered in off the street into the House of Representatives, saying, “Let’s put on a show!” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon kook who wandered in off Facebook. Lauren Boebert is a general-purpose incompetent who wandered in after accidentally poisoning people with bad pork sliders at a county fair in Colorado. Matt Gaetz’s grandfather died of a heart attack at the North Dakota GOP convention, being at that time a minor public official and, apparently, a clairvoyant. This gang represents what you might call the immaculate grift: grift liberated from the burden of trying to carry forward a real political program or philosophy, grift for grift’s sake, ars (of a sort) gratia pecuniae. Putting these people into Congress is like mashing up Carmina Burana with the Ghostbusters theme—yeah, you can do that, there’s no law against it as far as I know, but … why_?_ 

Santos was—is?—whatever anybody needed him to be, the ultimate Novelty Con: Gay! Jewish! (or “Jew-ish.”) Latino! Whatever! He is the epitome of what the Republican Party stands for (“stands for”) in 2023: the willingness to say anything, however transparently dishonest, absurd, or self-abasing, in the hope of winning an election. He mustered some half-formed talk-radio grunts about inflation and crime and the like, but Santos was a pretty straightforward product: a gay Latino willing to put an “R” next to his name, the political version of whatever the opposite of a beard is. That Rep. Santos finally embarrassed the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert enough to get him expelled from the House is his only actual achievement in life.

I can’t say I’m proud of the GOP, but that enough Republicans joined Democrats to expel Santos makes me despise it a hair less.

Bespoke realities

There is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, someone who lives in the real world but also has questions about the moon landing, and on the other, a person who believes the Covid vaccine is responsible for a vast number of American deaths and Jan. 6 was an inside job and the American elite is trying to replace the electorate with new immigrant voters and the 2020 election was rigged and Donald Trump is God’s divine choice to save America.

Such individuals don’t simply believe in a conspiracy theory, or theories. They live in a “bespoke reality.” That brilliant term comes from my friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and it refers to the effects of what DiResta calls a “Cambrian explosion of bubble realities,” communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”

…

Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth. The terms “voluntarily” and “cooperatively” are key. We don’t live in North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China. We’re drunk on freedom by comparison. We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.

David French

Progressives

The Westboro Baptist Church of the left

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to scream at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral this week. They also showed up to scream during New York’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, which is up there alongside blocking highways at rush hour when it comes to winning over normal people. As the writer Josh Kraushaar put it: these guys are becoming the Westboro Baptist Church of the left.

Nellie Bowles

Ivy League besliming itself

In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”

…

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country.

Andrew Sullivan.

Jordan Peterson made the same point, in a different context, that Sullivan makes in the penultimate paragraph: “It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.” Oppressed are higher status than oppressors; Jews are definitionally oppressors because they are coded “white.”

This is called “progressive.” I don’t care to protect the reputation of progressivism, so I’m not going to concern-troll on its behalf. Fly your freaky flags, progressive America! Let your offensiveness be stand in stark relief to sanity!

It’s times like this when I understand (not to say “agree with”) the rightwing insistence that every presidential election is existential, and that the Ds are far worse than the Rs.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Thursday, 11/16/23

Culture

Mind-bender

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

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

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

Strange congruence

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

Via Rod Dreher (emphasis added).

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

Magnificent scatological rant

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

City Lights go out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

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

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

Authoritarian, Totalitarian

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

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies.

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

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

Sarah Isgur: Haven’t found a better way.

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

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

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

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

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

Advisory Opinions

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

Half right

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

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

Political-ish

Looking back

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

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

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

Contrasting demeanors

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

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

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

Nick Cattogio, What Time It Is

I hope you don’t need my commentary on this

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

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

Via Damon Linker

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

Alexander Riley

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

Kristallnacht 2023

Today is the 85th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.

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

Culture

Swifties

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

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

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

VR

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

Sherry Turkle at Crooked Timber

Humblebragging

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

The Jewish intellect

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

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

Things nobody’d dare say today

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

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Did we forsake our sin or vice-versa?

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

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

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

The Feast of Hot Takes

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

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

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

Nick Cattogio

Politics

At or over the brink

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

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

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

Rod Dreher (italics added).

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

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

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

More Dreher:

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

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

Why the far Right is worse than the far Left

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

…

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

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

DeSantis’ disqualifying “signature move”

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

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

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

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

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

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

A flash of sanity; settled mendacity

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

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

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

Wut?!?!

Bummer of the day

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

Unfortunately, it appears to have been false:

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

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

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

The Left Made Us Do It!

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

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

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

Peter Wehner, Donald Trump Has Closed the Republican Mind

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

David French

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

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

I don’t write about characters in the traditional sense of the word. I write about humanity

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

[T]he book doesn’t say something; it does something—it works on us, giving us a kind of experience that’s impossible to get any other way.

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

Despite my backlog of bought books, I’ve got a feeling that Fosse’s Septology is in my future.

The Bunkinator

Whatever you think about Arnold Schwarzenegger, his films, or his donkey, his book—Be Useful: Seven Rules for Life—is bunk: “Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status (the erstwhile emperor is thanked in the acknowledgments), it’s thoroughly expendable — an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

Charles Arrowsmith, Sensei Schwarzenegger? The Governator attempts a reboot with a pallid self-help book via Prufrock

Stop Reading the News

This one’s aimed at me, but you might benefit, too:

We’re all connected. The planet is a global village. We sing “We Are the World” while swaying back-and-forth in harmony with thousands of others, holding our tiny lighters. This sense of empathy, magnified a thousandfold, feels wonderfully soft and cozy end yet it achieves absolutely nothing. This magical sense of all-encompassing, worldwide fellowship is a gigantic act of self-deceit. The fact is, consuming the news does not connect to other people and cultures. We’re connected to each other because we cooperate, trade, cultivate friendships and relationships, fall in love.

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

From my earliest youth, I understood that keeping up on current affairs was considered the lowest of low bars for good citizenship. I now seriously doubt that — though I really appreciate our local retired ink-stained wretch’s Substack, which in some ways outperforms his former employer’s newspaper in coverage of relevant local news (where individuals might influence things).

The present madness

Gate-crashers

But they identify as Women in Tech: There is a conference for women in tech, a group we used to care about a lot. It’s called Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, after the pioneering computer scientist. And since 1994, it’s been a place for women in the industry to gather, meet with recruiters, and hear female leaders talk onstage, though more recently the conference has opened to women and nonbinary folk. Something strange occurred this year: a ton of people signed up, claiming to be nonbinary. Those people happened to look a lot like what we used to call men. An event organizer took to the stage to say: “Simply put, some of you lied about your gender identity when you registered.” But how can they know this? What special test is there for nonbinary identification? Having more than two earrings? Hating your dad? 

Suddenly, NPR was engaging in transphobic gender essentialism, writing that “men took over” the job fair. Suddenly it was very, very easy for NPR to see that men would take advantage of gender self-ID to get into a women’s space. But it remains impossible to imagine a man would also do this to get into, let’s say, a women’s prison, or a women’s-only hospital ward, or a rape crisis center, or a domestic violence shelter, or a women’s changing room, or a women’s bathroom. You see, the women in prison are poor and are not friends with NPR employees; the women at the tech conference went to Barnard! Big difference. 

Speaking of something no one would never take advantage of—sports. The Swimming World Cup announced a whole new category this year for trans and gender-nonconforming folks to compete. I think it’s great—everyone who wants to race ought to be able to race, and this seemed really logical. Weirdly, when barred from competing against biological women but instead offered a trans category. . . no one signed up. World Aquatics, the governing body of the Swimming World Cup, announced this week they plan to try again. 

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

Life is triggering. Part of being an adult is learning to take responsibility for your feelings instead of insisting that it’s the world’s responsibility not to trigger you.

Coleman Hughes, whose TED Talk advocating color-blindness somehow has not yet been published. Reports of the reason(s) vary, and I’d only be revealing my cognitive bias if I noted that the true reason is obviously that some malcontent progressives at TED prefer antiracism™ to color-blindness.

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures – rooted in time, place and spirit – whether that be here in the remnants of rural Ireland, in indigenous communities in Mexico, Papua or India, on some of the last small farms in England, or simply talking to Maori or Native American or Aboriginal Australian people, I have been struck by one fact: people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost. Once an entire country is talking about nothing else, that’s a pretty good sign that the Machine has sprayed the roots of its people with Roundup and ploughed the remains into the field.

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

Carl R. Trueman, Prohibiting Prayer in Australia (emphasis added)

Boo-boo about BOBOs

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

Back in October of 2020, when Amy Coney Barrett was teed up to replace the Notorious RBG, Emma Green wrote:

Others believe Supreme Court victories for the anti-abortion-rights movement could be Pyrrhic, prompting a cultural backlash that will tilt public opinion in favor of expanded abortion rights.

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

I believe that fairly strongly. If the Supreme Court reverses Roe, thus returning the issue to the legislative process, we will see a lot of fake pro lifers change the tune they’ve been whistling. That’s why I long ago stopped fetishizing a human life amendment or a supreme court reversal of Roe v. Wade. We are saving more lives through crisis pregnancy centers. (On the other hand, the legislative process is precisely where the issue truly belongs, because the constitution is silent about it.)

I was wrong about the fake pro lifers abandoning the cause. Instead we saw, in the reddest of states, a Gadarene rush toward total abortion bans, no exceptions. I definitely did not foresee that.

I suspect that overreach, not the reversal of Roe v. Wade standing alone, is what has indeed created a backlash. Meanwhile, the media blackout on the Democrats’ opposite abortion extremism remains.

Effective LARPing the dark side

Of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley (and probably a few others):

[L]ike so very many elite members of the Republican Party, they’re standing well outside the white working class while they role-play a dark caricature of its values and interests. And all too many members of the American working class are eager to embrace that caricature. They soak up the pandering and pledge their loyalty in return.

David French

Radioactive

As a religious conservative, watching the MAGA Religious Right rally at the Jericho March was a red pill experience for me … The joining of religious faith to conspiracy theory, and the juicing it with nationalist fervor, and Trumpist cult of personality — it was radioactive.

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

Then came a climactic mystification. There came along the first Yugoslavian ticket-collector, a red-faced, ugly, amiable Croat. The Germans all held out their tickets, and lo and behold! They were all second-class. My husband and I gaped in bewilderment. It made the campaign they had conducted against the young man in coffee-and-cream clothes completely incomprehensible and not at all pleasing. … young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket,’ they would have nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and if I had gone on and said, ‘But you yourselves have only second-class tickets,’ they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

We are once again to a point where the reasoning of some of our fellow-citizens is impenetrable.

The Druids strike!

John Michael Greer, former Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, sees and seizes his opportunity: How magical combat can win the next election: Only a powerful spell can break our political disillusionment

Hiatus

I will be traveling on a tour of parts of Greece and a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, an Orthodox monastic Republic, and likely will not be posting again until sometime the week of October 22.

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

David French

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