Category: Economia

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

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

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

Even the secularists have rituals

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

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

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

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

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

Via John Ellis

Freud

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

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

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

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

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

…

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

…

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

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

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

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

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

Self-delegitimation

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

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

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

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

Expats

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

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

Most probably will not.

…

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

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

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

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

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

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

…

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

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

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

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

…

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

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

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

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

Niccolo Machiavelli

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

Frank Bruni

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

Populism anticipated

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

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

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

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

Also Also Presented Without Comment

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

Australia can have him

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

Jim Ellis, News Items

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Notebook Dump 6/13/24

Culture

Incentivizing misery (bad urbanism)

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated … to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Assignable Curiosity” — ouch!

As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

By what authority?

The newest [Covid conspiracy theory] I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

Zeynep Tufekci, A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (emphasis added)

And then there’s the National Security officials who prostituted themselves to declare Hunter Biden’s laptop a made-in-Russia hoax.

If I were on the Left, I hope I’d have the objectivity to reject most of what comes out of HRC and SPLC, both of them media-coddled bullshit factories, dependent on fear to stay in business. (By all rights, HRC should have declared victory and closed up shop after Obergefell; instead, it took up a version of transgender rights that many gays and lesbians reject.) But the Media lap up their stuff.

I don’t know who’s trustworthy any more. Whereas I formerly read stuff regularly from sources on the fairly far Left and Right, I now try to stick to sane-seeming, more-or-less-centrist sources, the fairly far Left and Right having become chronic liars. But I have no conclusive reason to think the center isn’t lying, too.

Any glimmers of absolute certainty I saw in the past were probably unwarranted, but these days it’s hard to find “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Elusive higher purposes

L.M. Sacacas attempts to disenthrall us from a subtle delusion:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

…

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one’s breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind’s wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn’t paint some days, didn’t even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

Teflon Sam

A liberal (maybe even left-wing) provocateur named Lauren Windsor attended a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society and, with hidden recording device and pretending to be a fervent Catholic conservative, tried to bait Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito into saying something inflammatory. She utterly struck out with Roberts but got an polite, anodyne response from Alito. The liberal media are now dishonestly engaged in trying to distill something sinister, even theocratic, from the weak tea of what he said.

But …

To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.

Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.

As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.

Marc O. DeGirolami. And:

Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Rod Dreher.

Errata

In March, I wrote:

IVF is in fact popular … (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

I stand at least semi-corrected:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels. (Source: politico.com)

Via John Ellis, whose daily new curation I recently discovered.

I note that the SBC resolution does not call for legislation, but I’m placing no bets on this being the end of the subject.

If you have no idea why anyone might opposed IVF, you need to get out more. As an oblique reminder, I again dig into my archives:

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

Beginning with the paragraph “The media’s manipulations …”, Ryan Anderson critiques IVF more directly.

Politics

Trading Power for Liberty

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

David French, MAGA Turns Against the Constitution

Western Hegemony has ended

Five hundred years of Western hegemony has ended, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.

NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war between the West and Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.

The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony as opposed to its revival. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganised as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, socialising inferiors is replaced by negotiations, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.

The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect of compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear wan increasingly likely.

Summary blurb for Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, recommended by cyberfriend and blogger Terry Cowan.

Although Diesen, even Cowan, pay closer attention to such things than I do, this is very much my view as well. So do I buy the book to confirm my priors or move on to another topic? If the Russia-Ukraine war ends before I buy it, I’ll probably move on.

But first, a key quote, from 1987 and from an eminent source, to keep and ponder:

George Kennan:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to go on, substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Via Diesen and Terry Cowan

Nothing has changed. It is literally true that we invent enemies to justify feeding what Dwight Eisenhower presciently called “the military-industrial complex.”

J.D. Vance (see below) also thinks the world is becoming multipolar.

J.D. Vance

Ross Douthat has an important interview: J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party. I’m sharing an unlocked version which, if you wonder, as I do, “What happened to the never-Trump author of Hillbilly Elegy?” is worth reading.

I’ll probably wrestle with it more if he becomes Trump’s running mate. For now, I’m slightly less cynical about his change(s) over eight years than I was before, and I find that I’m of one mind with him substantively on a few things.

Balancing Sociopathy against policy

I don’t apologize for the votes I cast after careful (indeed, searching) consideration. However, I do have to apologize for my view of the never Trumpers whom I found to be histrionic and unrealistic. They saw further that there were significant risks involved with Donald Trump that could very well outweigh the policy outcomes. They were right about that, and they deserve an apology from me (and perhaps others who saw it the way I did) for not perceiving that their concerns were grounded in reality, not merely some idealistic moral fragility. They perceived a legitimate threat, which did come to significant fruition.

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

This, published 9 days after the January 6 insurrection (or whatever you want to call it, except “patriot rally” or its cognates) remains worth reading — if only for his rationale for voting as he did. I consider his rationale incoherent; one need not vote for a menace who might do some good things in order avoid being a “free rider” if the menace actually does them. One can say “I think the menace outweighs the possible benefits.”

Reminder …

I’ve moved most political stuff to another blog, but if you’re curious, they’re just a click away.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

June!

Culture

Summertime wordplay

[I]n The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, James Lileks described the “glorious boredom” of a child’s summer with its “endlessly attenuated twilight, as the sun slides down like a hot coin and starts up the jukebox of crickets and frogs.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis)

(Via Frank Bruni)

The fate of the humanities

There’s no shortage of voices lamenting the state of the humanities, or at least of humanities departments. I was going to compile some samples, but if you’re interested, you’re already aware of them.

Are they wrong? Are the humanities actually at a new dawn?

The math nerds built our world, from the apps we use to get to work to the way we order our toilet paper. But with the rise of AI, are the coders set to become victims of their own success? Peter Thiel thinks so. In a recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, the PayPal co-founder predicted that the new technology would be “worse for the math people than for the word people.” What use is spending four years learning how to code when AI can do it all for you? 

The author Luke Burgis, echoing Thiel, predicts a “bull market in the humanities.” As he put it in a recent post on his Substack, “the humanities, rightly understood, are things that technology cannot take away or substitute for.” By the humanities, Burgis doesn’t mean the “ideological programs of cultural change” at elite universities. He means the humanities broadly understood as the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, and arts that explores “what it truly means to be human.” 

We may be in the middle of a technological revolution, but paradoxically, what’s timeless and ancient might be more valuable than what’s timely and modern.

The Free Press

From a somewhat different perspective:

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

…

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

Brad East

Sportsball

[M]uch of the modern sports world has lost its luster for me.

The era is long gone when the lineups of professional teams had enough year-to-year continuity that one knew all the players’ names and stats. But the rotation in and out of teams, including now in college sports, has become such a blur that only TV commentators afflicted with hyperfocus can keep track.

Sure, money-ball’s metrics rule, but the reality remains that now you’re mostly rooting for mercenaries. And as cable TV fades, pro and college sports teams are disappearing into the permanent fog called streaming. Looking for the airtime of your favorite team can turn into a constant and costly snipe hunt. Is it worth it?

Daniel Henninger

Tap-dancing around the “W” word

Whether and when someone with a uterus gets their period — for the first time, and throughout their life — can reflect not only their reproductive health, but their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, miscarriage, and premature death ….

STAT, H/T John Ellis

Let’s see now. Slightly more than half the human race comes equipped with a uterus. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a word for them less kludgy than “persons with uteruses” or the equivalent?

I wish they’d stop doing this

To journalists, this is a lazy visual for “this is a story about something-or-other related to Russia.”

To this American Orthodox Christian, it insinuates “Russian Orthodoxy is up to something sinister again.”

I object!

MAGA flag

Nobody knew the flag was MAGA until Justice Alito flew it. Justice Alito, however, should have known it was evil, so the argument goes, since by flying it he made it evil. Okay, well. Commenters, please add what else Justice Alito needs to endorse so that it can become shameful, and if you agree that he should start with the term fur baby. As for the other Alito flag controversy, the upside-down American flag, turns out The Washington Post saw that when it was briefly flying in 2021 and decided not to report on it since it wasn’t really a story, but now that the election’s coming up, everyone’s going through their diaries.

Nellie Bowles

Unplanned unparenthood

The obvious reasons for postponing or forgoing parenthood, such as lack of money or building a career, no doubt play a part. But another, more welcome, trend is also evident. Breaking the data down by age shows that fertility is in serious decline only among America’s youngest women. Since the 1990s the fertility rate for those aged between 15 and 19 has fallen by 77%; that for 20- to 24-year olds is down by 48%. Meanwhile, it is slowly increasing for women aged 30 and over (see charts). In 1990 teenage pregnancies accounted for one in eight births. By 2022 this had fallen to one in 25.

The Economist

Politics

Vice-signaling

“Vice-signaling.” Surely I’ve heard it before, but Michelle Goldberg brought it back as the overall branding of today’s GOP. (Killing Dogs. Taunting the Homeless. Praising Al Capone. This Is Trump’s Party.) To that list we can ad “voting for convicted felons if they’re really brazen about it.”

Speaking of which:

The blasphemy of the radical left is to deny human depravity; the radical right’s blasphemy is to enshrine this depravity as noble.

Matthew Beringer

Choosing

Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character,” the piece concluded. “Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this November’s election day.”

There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other one—usually because we find “our guy” a less than optimal choice but “the other guy” strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing “our side” will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.

The last eight years have made me more certain I was right.

Matthew J. Franck, Choosing Not to Choose

“Choosing Not to Choose” is the title of a new piece by Matthew Franck published today on the site. Trump is wholly unfit for office, Franck allows, but so is Biden for different reasons. And it’s important that Americans not vote for a political candidate they believe is unfit, as one’s vote inevitably influences one’s character. Invest in a corrupt political cause on lesser-of-two-evils grounds and eventually, by feeling obliged to defend it and perhaps embrace it, you too will be corrupted.

…

My dispute with Franck is simple. I disagree with how he’s framed the choice before voters.

The question isn’t “Biden or Trump?” so much as it’s “Should we continue with the constitutional order as we’ve known it or try something radically different?”

I’ll guarantee here and now that if Trump becomes president again and remains in good health he’ll try to extend his term in office past 2029. I won’t guarantee that he’ll succeed, but the attempt will be made as surely as you’re reading this. Trump is less a person than a personality type and his type is compelled to pursue its own interests remorselessly above all things. I think he’d honestly find it hard to comprehend why someone in his position shouldn’t try to extend their time in power.

Biden won’t do that if reelected. (And not just because he might be catatonic by 2029.) He won’t defy court orders. He won’t stock the leadership of the Justice Department with fanatics who have sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally. He won’t call the military out into the streets to confront people protesting him. And, contra Franck, I don’t believe he’ll claim a “mandate” if he wins, since he’s all but certain to do so with fewer electoral votes than he received in 2020 and with a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Nick Cattogio, Choosing to Choose

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

May 30, 2024

Just yesterday …

Pick at random any other graduate from Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968, and call their wife the c-word. See what would happen. Judicial restraint would not be the order of the day. (By chance, the District Court judge I clerked for graduated from Steinert a few years before Justice Alito.)

Josh Blackman

I have no intention of entering into the dispute about Mrs. Justice Alito flying her flag funny or how she was or wasn’t provoked by neighbors.

Rather, I’m tattling on myself: when I read “Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968,” I thought “Who is he talking about? That’s just yesterday. Supreme Court Justices in 2024 graduated earlier than that!”

In point of fact, they did not. Most of the current court graduated later than that. Most of them are, in other words, young whippersnappers.

And I’m old enough to be that actress’s grandfather. And, no, I’m not up for a game of touch football this afternoon, thank you. And so on and so forth.

The mind rebels at the thought that I really am this old.

Nonpolitics

Chatbot “biographies”

Bruni recently published another book, The Age of Grievance, after which there appeared on Amazon’s pages a “biography” of him — actually, several — that apparently were generated by chatbots hoovering up random biographical bits from the web:

I guess that … I should be flattered? I am, sort of. I never imagined I’d be the subject of any biography, so a pamphlet of pablum exceeds my dreams! But I’m also unsettled, and not by the realization that my life, or at least life story, doesn’t belong to me, but by the idea that we are masses of bytes at the mercy of bots. In this scenario, emblematic of our digital age, I’m neither “he” nor “she.” I’m really more “it.”

Frank Bruni

The Humanities

I won’t deny that the downward trend in majors is troubling to people (like me) who love the humanities.

But I disagree with the notion that success is based on convincing 18 year olds to declare an English major. That makes a mockery of the whole subject. Youngsters may eventually decide that the humanities are worth studying, but that will only happen after humanistic thinking starts to pervade our society.

Ted Gioia, The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening at College

Extraction economy still

Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Sustainability

During some “foreign” travel a few years ago (Vancouver, BC), we got a carryout rotisserie chicken we tried to carve up in our hotel room with wooden knives and then eat with wooden sporks. I longed for plastic.

Plastic utensils set for immediate disposal after use truly is not sustainable though, and the Vancouver way (sigh!) is better.

Speaking of which:

David Mamet via Nellie Bowles (This is satire. With California, though, it’s sometimes hard to tell.)

The Algorithms Are Broken

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

…

I ought to share more examples. But there are so many. Where do I even start?

For example, Amazon’s algorithm suggests books I might enjoy. But the recommendations have gotten worse over time—much worse!—just like everything else coming out of the technocracy.

…

I became am a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

Ted Gioia, Let’s Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken

Irrational fear and animus

From my own experience, it seems the reverse is true: very few who hold a strong position on this issue, whether for or against SSM, are driven by irrational fear or animus. They seem to be driven by beliefs they hold to be properly basic in terms of justice, whether it is the rightly ordered ends of our sexual powers (including their relation to marriage’s nature) or the rightly ordered ends of our public institutions. Both sides answer these concerns differently and thus come to contrary conclusions on whether the legal recognition of SSM is just.

Francis J. Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

Success

Years ago at a Stanford conference, Girard faced a tough question about his unconventional methods. His research had involved a close reading of archaic texts—which is to say, stories. In them, he discerned hidden patterns of rivalry and the sacralization of violence to end strife, an unending sequence throughout the long night of humanity. His writing was seasoned with characteristic humor and insight—he had learned something about himself along his journey, and so did not offer himself as a hero or an answer.

After the talk, one man asked a provocative question: “Given that we can’t entirely trust the veracity of ancient writings, how would you measure the success of your theory?”

Girard’s answer was a thunderbolt in its directness and simplicity: “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.”

Cynthia L. Haven, We Do Not Come in Peace

NCAA

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair-market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair-market rate.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, in N.C.A.A. v. Alston, that student athletes should be able to profit from their names, images or likenesses. Via Jane Coaston

Advanced or underdeveloped?

The Stalinist interpretation of socialism has made it possible for socialists and capitalists alike to agree on how to measure the level of development a society has achieved. Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called “underdeveloped,” while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called “advanced.”

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Ouch!

The New York Times this week frames a shibboleth combined with a vague appeal to authority, writing: “President Biden placed electric vehicles at the heart of his climate agenda because scientists say that a rapid switch from gasoline-powered cars to electric versions is one of the most effective ways to slow the carbon dioxide emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.”

Economists might be better to consult than scientists, but, in all likelihood, no one was consulted by the Times on the question of whether the policy will be effective.

This sentence, we can safely assume, arose entirely as a backward-reasoned justification of the Biden program, concocted on the spot by a Times editor to fill the place where a reader expects to be assured that the policy has been vetted and found to be sensible.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Anatomy of an EV Policy Error

Politics

Nonsequitur of the week

(The Economist) A governor‘s pardon implies nothing about the trustworthiness of the courts that convicted the now-pardoned person.

Please: make sure brain is working before engaging mouth.

Not actual news, but cuts pretty close to the bone

TALLAHASSEE, FL—Touting the legislation as a common-sense victory for family values, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new law Thursday requiring all Florida women to produce three healthy, white sons by the date of their 22nd birthday. “The production of white daughters will not be penalized, but they will be seized by the state for the production of white sons,” said DeSantis, who clarified that regardless of the race, ethnicity, or religious background of the mother, all sons would be required to be both white and raised in a Catholic household. “Three is the bare minimum. Despite what the virtue-signaling, left-wing fanatics are espousing on CNN, this requirement is actually quite fair and attainable. Whether Florida women and girls choose to get started at age 15 or 19, they will have plenty of time to comply.” At press time, DeSantis added that a miscarriage counted as negative one white sons.

The Onion

Political bons mots

  • [I]n The Post, Matt Bai sought to trace J.D. Vance’s boundless sycophancy, including his appearance last week at Donald Trump’s trial: “I can’t say from experience how you’re supposed to know when you’ve officially become part of an organized crime family, but if you feel it necessary for your professional advancement to show up at a courthouse and pay respect to a patriarch charged with fraudulent payments to a porn star, chances are you check all the boxes.”
  • In USA Today, Rex Huppke examined the folly and failure of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s unsuccessful attempt to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Like a dull-witted Icarus, she has now flown too close to the dumb.”
  • In The Times, Bret Stephens previewed the first planned presidential debate next month: “If President Biden gets through the debate without committing a gaffe, he’ll surpass expectations. If Donald Trump gets through it without committing a felony, he’ll surpass expectations.”

Frank Bruni

I would be remiss were I not to give a shout-out to Kevin D. Williamson as well:

… Mike Johnson, a coup-backing knee-walking MAGA grotesque and Trump enabler who is somehow not depraved and sycophantic enough for [Marjorie Taylor] Greene.

Just links

I’ve posted some political things elsewhere that you might (or might not) want to see.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Public Affairs

On the one hand, I express no profound personal opinions here; on the other, I have some smart and provocative “takes” from others and some comments on them.

Stupid opinions on why a Trump conviction will be reversed

Any conviction obtained at the so-called “trial” of former President Donald Trump’s alleged alteration of financial records will be reversed on appeal, if necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court, because altering financial records is only a crime in New York if you do it to conceal some other crime. Paying Stormy Daniels money is NOT a crime. …

Steven Calabresi (emphasis added).

I would wager a substantial sum that the U.S. Supreme Court will not reverse a New York conviction of Trump at all, let alone on the basis that New York Courts misapplied New York law.

If the law is as Calabresi says, State appeal courts should reverse, but state Courts have the last word on what state law is.

Steven Calabresi is not a stupid man. This outburst was an example of motivated reasoning.

It’s still quite possible that the Manhattan jury will convict Trump on the 34 felony charges Bragg has brought. But there is no chance the conviction will withstand appeal, particularly given that it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.

Eli Lake (emphasis added).

I would wager even more that a conviction will not be reversed because it relies too heavily on Michael Cohen’s testimony. No Courts will have any idea what the jury relied on. That’s not how jury trials work.

I cannot vouch for Elli Lake not being stupid on legal matters. It rather appears that he is.

Note: This is not to say that Courts won’t reverse because particular testimony of Cohen was admitted over timely objection. Nor am I saying that this prosecution is solid and will not be reversed. There’s a lot of non-dopey analysis that thinks if very shaky. I’m just faulting stupid arguments that mislead non-lawyer readers.

History Rhyming?

I’ve been surprised at the intensity of the electorate’s hostility to post-Roe restrictive abortion legislation. I thought public opinion was more closely divided.

As we think about why voters are so hostile, though, it may be illuminating to remember the Protestant landscape pre-Roe. For one common instance:

The great majority [of pre-Roe Southern Baptists] favored such “therapeutic” abortions, but a small minority objected that abortion was murder, and another small minority argued that it should be legal in all cases. The divide, however, did not fall along the usual conservative-moderate lines, but rather, it seems, along the spectrum of anti-Catholicism.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals. Voters may just be reverting to pre-Roe positions.

I care a bit about what the various states do. But I’m still committed to federalism, unconvinced that this is an appropriate topic for national legislation.

Commencement Addresses

It’s like the opening parable of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love

But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history — or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may — One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

Equality

In these powerfully written essays Oakeshott points to the damage done when politics is directed from above towards a goal – whether liberty, equality or fraternity – and where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism

We in the US are suffering from a putative commitment to the goal of equality, “where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.”

I say “putative” because we seem to have lost the ability to identify which things truly are alike, and so should be treated alike, the ability to recognize that not all discrimination is invidious. Sometimes “discrimination” is the necessary consequence of discernment.

If the preceding seems impenetrably opaque, think about the dogma “trans women are women.” If that makes perfect, incontestable sense to you, you probably are loving our present love affair with “equality.” If you hesitate or disagree with “trans women are women,” you may be on my wavelength.

Elites and normies

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions—on immigration, gender, and climate, for example—are not popular with the normies. By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left.” The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

It rarely works. The chaos and contingencies of the digital age allow the normies and their chosen tribunes, the populists, too much room to maneuver. Trump’s rise in the opinion polls would otherwise be inexplicable.

Martin Gurri

Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

One result is that we are deprived of a fundamental requirement of any polity: a ruling class that will be perceived as legitimate.

…

At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to LARP at the barricades.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Why so few pro-Trump columnists

There aren’t many pro-Trump columnists at major papers because there aren’t many pro-Trump columnists anywhere.

In past years, it hardly seems possible that a major publication wouldn’t have a supporter of Ronald Reagan on George W. Bush on its staff. That is why in 2024, newspapers would love nothing more than to have an in-house columnist on Team Red Hat/Tie.

But Trumpism is a visual medium – it cannot withstand the scrutiny of a written column. Trump supporters can go on Fox News or Newsmax or OAN and say whatever they want in the moment without being fact-checked beforehand. But writing a column means having editors and fact checkers verify the claims you’re making.

And because no editor will rubber-stamp a claim like “the 2020 election was stolen,” someone who tries to argue Biden didn’t win the last election or that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were “political prisoners” will never be able to make their way to a legacy print outlet. A columnist that wanted to say, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence had the ability to choose his own electors in 2020 would be like a columnist earnestly arguing a woman is safer if she encounters a bear rather than a human man in the woods.

This phenomenon is glaringly obvious any time Trump goes on a network like CNN for a town hall or a debate. The falsehoods come so fast out of his mouth, the moderator can’t keep up, leaving 90 percent of his claims unchallenged. If the reporter stopped Trump to correct him on every lie he told, the event would be more moderator than candidate.

That is because being a Trumper is based almost solely on emotion and doesn’t rely on facts. Trumpism is a clenched fist, not an argument. And newspapers print arguments.

Christian Schneider, Where Are All the Pro-Trump Newspaper Columnists? (emphasis added; H/T The Morning Dispatch)

I am predisposed to credit Schneider’s argument because of people like Eric Metaxas.

Metaxas, a Yale grad, is an intellectual of sorts. He writes books. He hosts high-tone “Socrates in the City” conversations. I have it on fairly good authority that he’s genial and fun to talk to.

But he’s bereft of arguments for his election denialism. He has rock-solid certainty. As a word guy, he makes reductio ad Hitlerum analogies. He may have had mystical visions. But he has zero evidence. (Did I mention the rock-solid certainty?)

Checking in on the further-right

Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

… “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits … The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

…

Some of Kirk’s ads … sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.”

Ali Breland, Why Is Charlie Kirk Selling Me Food Rations?

Another Denialism

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Trust the science

The strong, as science had conclusively demonstrated, had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

Tom Holland, Dominion

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.

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

Friday, 5-17-24

Pearl-clutchers

“I have heard from a good number of people in the S.D.N.Y. who have said, ‘Why the heck would Todd [Blanche] do this — why would he ever take this case?’” Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst who worked with Mr. Blanche at the Southern District of New York, said in a recent profile. “My response is, generally, when did we become pearl-clutchers about defense lawyers defending defendants?”

Michael Wilson, Todd Blanche, Trump’s Lawyer in Hush-Money Trial, Cross-Examines Cohen

Just so.

The Culture Generally

Seeing whole people

[W]e have to stop just seeing these [gender dysphoric] young people through the lens of their gender and see them as whole people, and address the much broader range of challenges that they have, sometimes with their mental health, sometimes with undiagnosed neurodiversity. It’s really about helping them to thrive, not just saying “How do we address the gender?” in isolation.

Dr. Hilary Cass to the New York Times

Thinking small

Ted Gioia, Why Creatives Will Win by Thinking Small pulls together a convincing case that “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers” and are going independent and/or small to evade them. Taylor Swift and Substack are two examples, evading the gatekeepers of the sclerotic music and publishing industries respectively.

Maybe we could say that small is getting pretty big.

Ted Gioia’s got one of the best culture-analyzing Substacks going.

Living off inherited moral capital

“I wouldn’t call it a change of mind,” Will said of his transition from classical liberalism to traditionalist conservatism. “I would say that I had become much more sensitive to the problem that Gertrude Himmelfarb, her husband, Irving Kristol, and others were to cite. And that is: Does classic liberalism provide for its own continuation, or does it live off the moral capital of a different age?”

Guy Denton, George Will Stands Against Vehemence

Presented without comment

A female friend expressed outrage that Caitlin Clark would be paid a piddling $76,000 in her first year in the WNBA. (By comparison, the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft signed a four-year contract for $55 million.) I asked her what team drafted Clark. She did not know. I asked her whether she knew the name of New York’s WNBA team. She did not. The name of any team in the WNBA? Nope. A famous player in the WNBA? Again, no answer.

R. R. Reno

Ready, fire, aim

Staff at The New York Times are circulating a draft of a letter to their boss, executive editor Joe Kahn, criticizing him for saying that some young reporters are not fully committed to independent journalism. Pro tip: if you’re worried your boss thinks you’re all whiny activists, campaigning against him from within the newsroom is only proving his point. (Semafor)

Oliver Wiseman

Politics

Boondogglia, USA

[A]rena subsidies are a terrible use of finite government resources and a ridiculously egregious redistribution of wealth from regular Americans—fans and haters alike—to some of the wealthiest people and organizations on the planet. And, to top it all off, they’re a classic case of political malpractice—local officials delivering massive rents to various cronies by promising unwitting voters the world yet delivering far fewer—but still “seen”—economic and social benefits to their communities.

…

Maybe all this government support might be worth the costs if the subsidized facilities at issue produced even a fraction of the benefits that supporters promise, but they don’t. Instead, there are few positions on which more economists agree than the terribleness of sports arena subsidies.

Scott Lincicome, Sports Are Great, but Stadium Subsidies Stink

Election 2024

The default position of American conservative Christians in this Fall’s Presidential Election should be to abstain or to vote for a Third-Party Candidate. Neither major party candidate is acceptable, so we should avoid complicity with both. It’s a painful situation, but not complicated.

My unspoken premise is that America is, and long has been, off course, and like all empires is waning, slowly, then all at once. (I could be wrong about the all-at-once part; that may come from the part of Evangelical apocalypticism that I did not avoid and have not fully recovered from. “Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen” and all that.)

Neither major party has what it takes to fix that. Maybe no party does. Still, I intend to vote for Peter Sonski for President. That’s not just a protest vote. My values line up better with the American Solidarity Party than with either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Am I throwing my vote away? No. I’m telling both parties that they’re unacceptable. That’s a message well worth sending, not a waste. If enough people tell them that, they’ll change or fade into irrelevance. The first step toward changing our unsatisfactory two-party system, if it’s not entirely incorrigible, is to stop voting for lesser evils.

Am I voting for the other guy by not voting for your guy? No. I know how my home state is going to vote; my vote won’t be decisive — not in 2024, anyway. If polling was close enough that I thought it might make a difference, my correct decision would admittedly be harder emotionally. (I last voted for a “lesser evil” in, I believe, 2008.)

That’s it.

POTUS 2024

It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.

Dee, a friend of Peggy Noonan, explaining why she’s voting for Trump.

Polls suggest that a felony conviction would lose him some votes ….

David Graham. What kind of world are we living in that a felony conviction wouldn’t be the death of a campaign?

Liberalism versus authoritarianism

I’ve tried to understand the appeal of Donald Trump. David Brooks gives it an oblique stab, and I thought there was a lot to like in his analysis, which is about liberalism versus authoritarianism, and the draw of the latter.

Now I understand how we keep electing bozos

As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.

Wall Street Journal.

Might there be, among those misinformed folks, people who give Biden credit for Dobbs as well as those who blame him? Or is ignorance a “pro-choice” exclusive?

Female success in Trumplandia

  • In The Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian noted that Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sarah Palin, among others, conform to a certain MAGA model for women leaders: “First, they want to prove how tough they are by shooting guns, preferably at animals, though occasionally at cars that Democrats drive. And second, they aspire to beauty standards set by Fox News anchors. Dental veneers. Cheek and lip fillers. Botox. Hair extensions. Performative cruelty and pouty lips are what it takes to succeed as a woman in the party of Trump.” (Judy Moise, Seattle)
  • In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley appraised a recent Rolling Stones concert and wrote that Mick Jagger’s physicality “invites you to imagine Mikhail Baryshnikov raised by a family of overcaffeinated roosters.” (Paul Welch, Phoenix, and Dan Olson, Spokane, Wash., among others)

Frank Bruni

How MAGAworld grew

Of all passions the passion for the Inner [Circle] is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I have watched this play out powerfully since 2016.

De-polarizing maxims to live by

  • The people you think of as your enemies aren’t as wicked as you believe them to be.
  • If you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do heretical religion.

Putting things in perspective

  • In a gloomy mood about the state of the world, I was reminded that the big actors of today, Trump, Biden, Putin, etc. etc. will mostly be dead, and very soon. Thinking in terms of living so that our communities outlast the current commotions is important.
  • Leonard Woolf: “One of the most horrible things … was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler — the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. … One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers. … Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’”

John Brady and Jim Rain, respectively, on the best social medium in the cosmos.

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.

Screed-free!

Comparative Free Speech Law

While every liberal democracy in the world claims to guarantee free expression in some form, the United States is essentially the only country where the government may not “take sides” on contentious issues by censoring expression based on the speaker’s viewpoint. As the post-October 7 examples show, many European countries have indeed taken a side in the public discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in a way that might surprise many American observers: calls for a ceasefire and an end to what they see as an Israel-perpetrated genocide are criminally prohibited hate speech, while support for continued attacks is constitutionally protected. This strange result illustrates the unintended consequences of allowing governments to pick and choose which beliefs are unlawful “hate speech” and which are fair criticism.

The notion—dominant the in most of the world—that hateful speech is not “free speech” dates at least to the global post-World War II reckoning with Nazism …

[H]ate speech is notoriously hard to define, and these systems often give wide latitude to officials to decide what these terms even mean and who should be prosecuted, discretion which officials often use in inconsistent and unpredictable ways.

…

How governments are responding to Israel-Gaza protests illustrates these radically diverging constitutional commitments to viewpoint neutrality. European national officials defended some of these pro-Palestinian restrictions primarily on public-order grounds more than stifling hate. But even so, the double standard implies that they view much of anti-Israeli speech as inherently anti-Semitic, and therefore, beyond the pale. This leads to a paradox, in which criticizing Muslims or Arabs as a group can constitute unlawful hate speech, but many expressions of support for Islamic-Arab groups are also prohibited, because of the threat that the government thinks those groups pose.

…

These examples offer a cautionary tale: When empowering the government to decide which beliefs are illegitimate, future policymakers may not use that power in ways you like or anticipate. They may even decide that your own viewpoints are the illegitimate ones—as with the song of South African anti-apartheid activists, “Shoot the Boer (i.e., white farmer)”; gender-critical feminists’ insistence that natal sex is critical to sexual orientation; and more recently, Palestinian advocates’ calls for a ceasefire and a “free Palestine.”

Scholars and activists celebrating new and stronger hate-speech laws might therefore consider Justice Hugo Black’s 1952 reaction to a (now largely discredited) decision upholding a conviction for disparaging Black Americans: “If there be minority groups who hail this [development] as their victory,” he wrote, they should contemplate Pyrrhus of Epirus’s observation: “Another such victory and I am undone.”

Kevin Cope, The Global Hate-Speech Conundrum via Eugene Volokh (bold added)

Too rich

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Out with the old, in with … ummmm …indifference

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built …

In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide …

There are desperately ill, utterly impoverished, terribly vulnerable people living on the street right now. They are exactly the kind of people the left should fight for. But because we have become such a caricature of ourselves, we are incapable of acknowledging that some people really are fucked up, that some people really are dangerous, that some people really aren’t just different but are sick, ugly sick, violent sick, no-silver-lining sick. Not beautiful and poetic madness but drug addicted, horrifically paranoid, caked-in-shit sick. And what people like that need is to be forced into treatment to save their lives. But sunny, false notions that everyone muttering to themselves on the subway hides a sweet little self-actualized busy bee inside of them, and an impossibly myopic fixation on the abstract rights of people whose brains have hijacked their minds, has left us unable to provide the actual help the severely mentally ill need. I have found no way to penetrate the liberal consciousness on this issue. Because it’s conservatives, I guess, who complain about violence and disorder on the streets.

Freddie deBoer, We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Car

Abortion politics

Even if I were still a single-issue (abortion) voter (I’m not; I’ve seen too many insane and/or phoney “pro-life” candidates), the GOP no longer make a compelling case on that issue.

Hamas Hyperbole, Media Credulity

In a May 6 report, the UN stated the death toll was 34,735, including 9,500 women and 14,500 children, or at least 24,000 civilians. 

But two days later, the UN quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died. The total number of deaths is about the same at 34,844, but that number includes 4,959 women and 7,797 children—a total of 12,756 civilians. (And this from the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel in 2023, compared to seven for the rest of the world combined.) 

This revision is the clearest sign yet that Hamas’s statistics cannot be trusted. As David Adesnik, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says: “The UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months.”

…

Spencer says that even the revised UN figures probably overstate the death toll, because the numbers aren’t limited to people who were killed in the war. “The UN numbers include every death in Palestine no matter what the cause was,” Spencer told The Free Press. “Every natural death, missing person, anyone killed by Hamas.”

And yet, so far not a single major media platform, save Fox News, has reported on the new UN numbers.

Oliver Wiseman, Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War

China bogeyman

On a Newsweek article skewering Viktor Orbán for his friendliness toward China:

China doesn’t give a damn what Hungary does with its borders, or with LGBT policy. That’s not to say that China doesn’t have and pursue its own interests. The Chinese are not altruists. It’s just that dealing with them, countries can preserve sovereignty in ways the West makes harder and harder to do.

Talk to African diplomats and lawmakers, and you’ll hear from them deep exasperation with the way Western countries constantly push feminist and LGBT ideology on them, as a condition of foreign aid. I invite you to spend just a little bit of time googling “LGBT”, “feminist” and “foreign policy”. Western institutions are as militantly evangelical about these ideologies as the Church was about religion in the Age of Discovery.

If your country wants and needs development aid, but wants to maintain cultural sovereignty, you’re going to look to China. To be very clear, Chinese support also has strings attached! But they are different strings. My point is simply that mindless cheerleaders for the Western establishment, like the Newsweek essayist, should make the effort to see what things look like to people outside the Greater American Empire.

Rod Dreher, ’4 Legs Good! 2 Legs Bad!’ Conservatism

Pre-emptive strike

Ron DeSantis bans cultivated meat in Florida because … reasons:

I’m not making this up. He Tweeted this graphic.

Strong People

Whenever I watch a Netflix show these days, it seems as if there are several themes that are yawningly predictable. One of them is the motif of the “strong woman.” (I’m not referring to the South Park “strong woman.” That is a subject for another day.) 

I mean the way in which female characters must now almost always be shown to be people of unbelievable strength—including rather unbelievable physical strength. One reason the recent Amazon adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (called The Rings of Power) flopped is that it tried to push this motif at every turn. In one especially implausible scene, a “strong woman” fights off a whole horde of armor-clad men with her bare fists. We were meant to marvel at her strength. Most people reached for the off switch.

Douglas Murray

I didn’t make it past the first 15 minutes or so of The Rings of Power, but it took me 6 episodes to reach my limit on Apple TV’s Sugar, which ended with a similarly absurd show of superhuman strength.

Zero-sum

Maybe the prospective [wedding service] customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Robert P. George Amicus Brief in 303 Creative, quoted by Francis J. Beckwith in Taking Rites Seriously.

Anti-Trump screeds moved to my personal Journal

There were two screeds here. They’re gone now. You’re welcome.

Here’s the gist of the first.

The second is from his own mouth via The Guardian and the Morning Dispatch.

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 Notebook Dump 5-11-24

Culture

Mind your own business

I have mixed feelings about Aaron Renn, of whom you may not even have heard. But he has a provocative suggestion, which I’ll paraphrase.

Why should conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, oppose jackassery like the Columbia University occupation? Columbia doesn’t love conservatives, or Christians.

Columbia itself produced the brats who now threaten it. Do we even have a horse in this race? Would it be bad for us if Columbia paid the price for what it has become?

Such is liberal hegemony in the cultural institutions (arts, education, media) that we lament it constantly. Why then should we leap to defend these leftist institutions when they’re under threat from folks even further to the left?

There’s something to be said for sitting back and enjoying the show.

AR-15 as totem

In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading. 

Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson then really gets into the weeds. Though I’m not a huge gun enthusiast, I enjoy reading columns like this because of what they say about the sloppy journalism they’re critiquing and because I often learn things I didn’t know, like:

It is probably worth noting here that AR-style rifles are used in a very, very small share of shootings in the United States: All rifles together typically account for something less than 3 percent of the firearms homicides in the United States in a given year. Rifles are more commonly used in mass shootings, but, even in those high-profile crimes, they are used in a minority of cases, about 28 percent. The most common firearm used in a violent crime in the United States is the 9mm semiautomatic handgun—which is the most common handgun found in the United States.

Mass shooters often choose AR-style rifles for obvious reasons—because they are common, relatively easy to operate, and the rifle that most Americans are most familiar with—and for reasons that are best described as totemic. … Gun-control advocates who want to prohibit only AR-style rifles are seeking a merely symbolic victory—those other semiautomatic rifles would remain on the market and presumably would be used for the common legitimate and rare criminal purposes AR-style rifles are used for.

…

We could—and probably should—be more aggressive in prosecuting the crime of simple illegal firearm possession absent some additional violent offense, and we probably should hand down stiffer sentences more consistently for that crime rather than doing what we do now—which is dismissing the great majority of those cases or pleading them down to some trivial misdemeanor.

But rigorously enforcing the laws regarding firearm possession with prison sentences is going to mean a lot more young men becoming incarcerated felons earlier in life, and it is nearly certain that those young men will be disproportionately black and poor. … We should probably arrest and prosecute a lot more straw-buyers than we do, but we should be clear-eyed about who those straw-buyers are going to be—people with otherwise clean criminal records, often girlfriends or family members of convicted felons—before we start locking them up.

…

And they wonder why demagogues get so much mileage out of claims about “fake news.” It’s shameful stuff.

Whew! That’s a relief!

Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself.

Alan Jacobs, back to the brows

I know the internet has dumbed us down, and I’m not exempt from that. But I try to keep challenging books in my book list. My need to read other things, too, is hereby vindicated!

Jacobs throws out another thesis about “the brows” (low-, middle-, and high-):

For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Intrinsic values

When people say that something is “valuable in and of itself,” I think what they mean is simply that it has no economic or social value — note Kirsch’s contrast between intrinsic value and something valued because it “makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.” Someone might say that when we say some artifact or experience is intrinsically valuable we’re saying that it does not have any instrumental value — but isn’t a song that delights me instrumental to that delight? And isn’t that okay? 

So I think that when we describe something as having intrinsic value, what we really mean is that the value it provides is higher than or nobler than any furthering of crassly economic or social ambitions. We’re indirectly and somewhat sloppily appealing to a hierarchy of goods. And maybe — especially in the context of debates about liberal education, which is at least partly the context of Kirsch’s essay — we should be more explicit about that, and conscious of what our hierarchy is and why we affirm it.

We are blessed that Alan Jacobs, (intrinsic values) uses this blog as a digital notebook, tagging his entries for future retrieval.

AI gonna sell us stuff

[W]hen the hysterical claims about the coming of “the Singularity” and quickly-approaching AI doom/utopia subside, what we’ll find is that most of what AI is doing is a more complex and sophisticated version of what Silicon Valley already does: giving us increasingly-aggressive recommendations for how to sate our various needs.

…

The longstanding battle between the individual and the state will come to look quaint in comparison to the battle of the human against the profit-maximizing AI, an entity that is distributed and depersonalized and so can have no personal accountability. And it will all be happening with a populace that has grown used to seeing digital systems as permanent authorities that they have no ability to defy.

Freddie deBoer

Peak Woke?

Both wokeness and anti-wokeness have lost their transgressive edge. Now they’re both kind of “cringe,” as the kids say.

And that is a sign of healing. 

One of the worst annoyances of polarized politics is the way the fringes symbiotically feed off each other. Like bootleggers and Baptists both benefiting from blue laws, the extreme left and extreme right need each other to justify their catastrophizing. The worst thing that could happen for Republican House fundraising efforts would be for the “Squad” of far-left members of Congress to be replaced by sensible Democrats. And the last thing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wants is for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be primaried by an intelligent Republican who doesn’t talk about Jewish space lasers.

Jonah Goldberg

News-Be-Gone

The news industry is Society’s appendix – permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed.

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

This is advice I’ve been unable to follow very far.

Legalia

Picking dead pigeons in the Park

Jonathan Alter has a better idea than putting Trump in jail for further contempt, with all the Secret Service and other complications. Jail for the Chief? There’s a Better Punishment.

Education

The beginning of the end … of this particular miserable chapter

MIT sours on DEI: MIT has done away with mandatory diversity statements in their hiring process. The president of the school, Sally Kornbluth, told John Sailer: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” This is a watershed moment: MIT is the first elite school to reverse course on this policy. Let’s see what schools follow suit.

Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press

DEI was the latest chapter in the effort to purge wrongthinking conservatives from our institutions. Its end will be the beginning of a re-branded effort.

Campus

  • As university administrators nationwide grapple with how to deal with anti-Israel encampments, former Nebraska senator and current University of Florida President Ben Sasse wrote in the Wall Street Journal of a model to follow. “At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended,” he wrote. “We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas. … For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. … Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties.”

The Morning Dispatch

The World

Israel, Hamas, Gaza

  • A Palestinian man living in the U.S. offers both grief for his family who have died in Israel’s war against Hamas and condemnation for the terrorist organization that sacrificed his homeland. “Thirty-one,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib wrote for The Times of London. “That’s how many of my extended family members have died in Gaza since October 7. … The past seven months have entailed endless sleepless nights, close calls, false alarms and frantic attempts to help locate missing family members.” But the pro-Palestianian, anti-Israel narrative in the West misses a key truth, he argued. “Many believe Gaza was this unbelievably awful place before October 7, an unrelenting prison with nothing in it worth living for. They then conclude that Hamas’s horrendous attack was a legitimate reaction to Israeli policies that made Gaza a concentration camp. But this perspective misses an important truth. It fails to recognise that even with Israel’s multifaceted blockade, which has been in place since 2007, Gaza was a beautiful place that meant so much to its residents and people. … Hamas needlessly and criminally threw all of this away as part of nefarious calculations by violent and homicidal leaders who have utter disregard and contempt for the average Palestinian citizen.”

The Morning Dispatch

Politics

On not doubling down

Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?

… Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a lengthy and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”

…

“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. …

How had he made such a mistake?

“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”

Pamela Paul, One Black Conservative Continues to Stand Apart (emphasis added)

Forming alliances on the basis of shared hatreds is soul-scarring.

Of course he said the quiet part out loud

That brings us to a Washington Post article this morning. At a Mar-a-Lago meeting in April, oil executives complained that despite pouring hundreds of millions into lobbying the government, the Biden administration had pursued stronger environmental regulations. “Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House,” the Post reports. In exchange, Trump vowed to roll back current regulations and freeze future ones. He told them that, given the savings, a billion bucks would be a “deal” for them.

What Trump was offering is entirely legal and absolutely corrupt. (Or to borrow a phrase: very legal and very uncool.) Thanks to Trump’s bluntness, there can be no hair-splitting about what’s going on here, and that’s good for public understanding. Trump asked special interests for an eye-popping fee in exchange explicit favors. Trump and the oil companies might argue (dubiously) that their preferred regime would actually be better for consumers, but they are cutting “the people” out of the discussion entirely, subverting democracy. The deal is getting done between Trump and the suits, behind closed doors. It’s a good reminder that Trump’s claim to being an outsider is a sham.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Legal, Corrupt Offer to Oil Executives

Bipartisanship today

Who’s responsible for the illegal immigration problem?

When it comes to immigration, it’s true that the Biden administration belatedly worked with legislators to settle on a compromise bill that would stem the flow of migrants (including refugees) to the southern border. But it’s also true that Republicans, led by Trump, decided they’d prefer to keep the border a festering problem through an election year in order to hurt the president.

That’s cynical, hardball politics. But that’s just another way of saying it’s politics well played. (It ain’t beanbag, after all.)

Damon Linker. The key words are belated, prefer, fester and cynic.

Momala

[2020] was the year when friendships were shattered and livelihoods ruined because someone didn’t post a black square on Instagram; when every suburban wine mom was frantically reading White Fragility for her anti-racist book club; when members of Congress posed for an absurdly self-serious photo shoot draped in kente cloth. It was the year when representation mattered—to the exclusion of basically everything else. 

This miasma of liberal white guilt and frantic, performative virtue-signaling was the birthplace of many a bizarre cultural artifact, like the anti-racism research center for which Ibram X. Kendi received (and squandered) $43 million, or the $250,000 “Woke Kindergarten” program that taught five-year-olds in San Francisco to “disrupt whiteness.” But its most lasting legacy, arguably, is Kamala Harris, who ended up a skipped heartbeat away from the top job for reasons that were primarily aesthetic: once Biden promised to pick a woman of color as his running mate, her selection was all but guaranteed.

…

[H]er social justice credentials are thoroughly undermined by her actual record: one of a career prosecutor with a penchant for authoritarian overreach and a hostility to civil liberties.

As an attorney, she—or people working on her behalf—routinely fought to keep innocent people in prison, to avoid compensating the wrongfully convicted, and to protect corrupt cops and prosecutors. In her capacity as California’s district attorney, she stood in the way of advanced DNA testing that could have proved the innocence of a man who had spent four decades on death row—until a 2018 story about the case created bad press for her presidential campaign, at which point she hastily (and uselessly) declared that she now supported the test.

==And then there’s her legal war against the founders of Backpage.com, a classified ads site with a robust “Adult Services” section. Harris charged Michael Lacey and James Larkin with conspiracy to commit pimping back in 2016. This eight-year effort is the clearest manifestation I have ever seen of the phrase “the process is the punishment.” In August 2023, on the eve of yet another court battle, James Larkin committed suicide. In reaction to this news, Reason’s Matt Welch noted: “You will see 100 times more ink spilled this year on chimerical right-wing book bans than you will on the vice president’s scapegoat blowing his brains out.” He was right, sort of; the actual ratio of book ban coverage as compared to Larkin’s suicide was more like 10,000 to one.

I’ve commented little on Kamala Harris because she has been nearly invisible as Vice President in these tumultuous times. But I’m grateful to Kat Rosenfield (America Doesn’t Need Momala Harris) for this reminder of why I detested her conduct in California government and rued Joe Biden selecting her for VP.

Misogyny

Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four more years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.

By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Misogyny and Stormy Daniels

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.

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.