I can’t get this out of my head as pundits keep explaining what’s wrong with every approach to dealing with Donald Trump’s damnable lies and crimes: A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable. (David French)
If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, what do you call vice so shameless that it doesn’t even pretend to be virtuous?
(Asking for a friend whose initials are USA)
On a related note:
Of impeachment #2, from January 6, Mitch McConnell says we can’t impeach a President who’s no longer in office but there’s always the legal system.
Four indictments into the legal system, Republicans scream that “the Democrats are criminalizing politics.”
There’s just no pleasing utterly unprincipled power-seekers.
The end of the uneasy anti-Roe coalition
The [Supreme] Court’s landmark [Dobbs] decision brought an end to that uneasy anti-Roe coalition, revealing the amalgamation for what it was: a group of fellow travelers whose interests aligned to a point, but who had their own, separate visions for what would replace the status quo. Was overturning Roe and returning the abortion issue to the states the end goal, as many Federalist Society types saw it? Was Alito’s Dobbs decision the first step toward a nationwide ban? Is there a middle ground that’s both morally acceptable to the pro-life movement and electorally popular?
If the conveyor belt of science dictating politics has fallen out of favor in administrative law and is even more obviously inapplicable to politics in general, why are so many politicians returning to its rhetoric? The reason is that, even if it is an intellectually bankrupt tradition, it remains politically useful. Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates. It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.
I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, said Thursday he would not call a special session of the legislature to investigate Willis, despite requests from some GOP lawmakers in the state. “Up to this point, I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’ actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission,” Kemp told reporters.
Mike Pence at the first GOP Presidential debate for the 2024 election.
I thought that was wrong in one sense when I first read it, justifying Pence’s position favoring national abortion legislation. For more than 40 years, I said that reversing Roe would return the abortion issue to the states. Now Mike Pence was boasting that it was a mark of his awesome leadership to over-promise dubiously-constitutional legislation on abortion.
My conviction has grown since then that it’s sheer idiocy, faux high rhetoric. Consensus is not the opposite of leadership; it is a goal of leadership.
Shorts
American conservatism
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.
Alan Jacobs finds Pablo Neruda’s book blurb the greatest ever:
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
“We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being ‘fired up’ for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally,” Smith wrote. “For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues.”
For some reason, this way of being Christian never appealed to me, though it was in many ways my millieu for a long time in my formative years. I never took the Book of Common Prayer (Episcopalian/Anglican) route, but took a twenty-some-year detour through a Calvinism that, God be thanked, wasn’t very friendly to the second option:
The Hate Option
I’d never heard of the book The Boniface Option, and with any luck I’ll never hear of it again. Its premise (mediated to me by the reviewer) seems to be that following Jesus is synonymous with being pissed off at all the bad people and ideas around us.
But Rod Dreher fears it will fall into the hands of angry, Christianish young men who’ll take it as gospel. He also knows, from his own life experience and continuing propensities, how dangerous it is:
The Boniface Option is a strange book. I’d say eighty percent of it already appeared in The Benedict Option (I’m certainly not accusing author Andrew Isker of plagiarism; I’m simply saying that the ideas are not new). But this book is just over half as long, and the ideas have been re-imagined here as pugnacious and resentful. If you had ever wondered how The Benedict Option would have been if its author were a late-millennial Calvinist Memelord Of Moscow, Idaho, well, now you have your answer.
…
[I]f you aren’t angry at what this world has become, you aren’t paying attention. Who can live on that, though? Who should want to live on it? I’ve noticed over the years, watching how disciples of Douglas Wilson operate rhetorically, that they typically lead with a quarrelsome overstatement, and take strong negative reaction to it as a sign that they’ve really hit the mark with their criticism. Sometime that’s true, I suppose, but more often than not, it’s because they have been nasty for the sake of being nasty, or petulant because they think that shows strength. I once knew a nice young man who had been trained by Wilson, who leaned into being verbally obnoxious in public discussions, because he genuinely believed this was how one advanced the Kingdom. He truly thought that this was manly. He ended up mostly making people feel sorry for him, if they didn’t outright dislike him for what they took to be his arrogance.
…
Another Protestant pastor, of an earlier generation, wrote:
There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates…. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does.
Those are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., commenting on the command of Our Lord to love those who hate us, and to pray for those who persecute us.
…
As a conservative Catholic in 2002, I took the Boniface Option in tearing into the corrupt clerics, rotten institutions, and hideous complacency in the Catholic Church, as revealed by the abuse scandal. I hated half-measures, and scorned fellow Catholics who hemmed and hawed about how it wasn’t as bad as all that. And you know what? To this day, seventeen years after I burned out and lost my Catholic faith, I believe I was far more right than wrong. Many of those people really were cowards. Some of those who encouraged me from behind to keep flailing away with my axe against the crooks and the cretins in the Church, while taking no risks themselves to do the same, were also among the first to criticize me when, spiritually exhausted, my faith collapsed.
My error was thinking I was strong enough to take down a tree as formidable as the evil one that had grown within the garden of the Catholic Church. I believed then that the only brave option was taking on the idol with the axe that was my pen, and chopping like a berserker. I lacked prudence, but more to the point, I did not have the internal spiritual resources necessary to see me through the fight. You readers know my story about how Father Tom Doyle warned me early on that I would be going to places darker than I could imagine, and that I would need to be ready for it. He was right — and I wasn’t ready.
This is the risk that Isker and his followers face.
This is the sort of Christianity that says “Yeah, yeah, yeah! ‘Turn the other cheek.’ Look at what that‘s got us!”
Bible Jesus Option
Bruce Cockburn was once an angry young man, but age may be softening him:
The just, the merciful, the cruel The stumbling well-intentioned fool The deft, the oaf, the witless pawn The golden one life smiles upon The squalling infant in mid-squall The neighbors fighting down the hall The list is long – as I recall Our orders said to love them all
The cynic and the crooked priest The woman wise, the sullen beast The enemy outside the gate The friend who leaves it all to fate The drunk who tags the bathroom stall The proud boy headed to his fall, The list is long – as I recall Our orders said to love them all
The pastor preaching shades of hate The self-inflating head of state The black and blue, the starved for bread The dread, the red, the better dead The sweet, the vile, the small, the tall The one who rises to the call The list is long – as I recall Our orders said to love them all
The one who lets his demons win The one we think we’re better than A challenge great – as I recall Our orders said to love them all
Orders, from Bruce Cockburn’s recent album O Sun O Moon
What secularism rejects
A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.
Then, throughout the entirety of Matthew 23, Jesus launched into a series of “Woes” and denunciations. He explained to one and all and to the Scribes and Pharisees to their face exactly why they were unable to understand the Kingdom, why they couldn’t recognize the Truth of it even though that Truth was standing and speaking and miraculously working right in front of them, just like He did with the Roman procurator in John 18.37, although Pilate was probably much more amenable.
The problem was simply hypocrisy. In the New Testament, hypocrisy is not inconsistency. That is a modern misunderstanding of the term.
Hypocrisy, rather, is existential schizophrenia. There is an exterior claim of piety, religiosity, and a prideful (but false) confidence of knowing the Kingdom. But on the inside, it’s all lies. There is a complete failure to love. There is a putrid cesspool of avarice and lust, pride and anger. And there is a demonic willingness to engage in domination, power, and violence, an enthusiasm for putting people in bondage and daring, horribly, to dress up their wickedness in religious clothing.
I was (am?) a culture warring evangelical. But, like so many, I’ve seen what that has gotten us. And I’ve seen what we’ve lost, too. So as much as I still very much identify as evangelical and want to recover whatever in it that is good, I also lament what we have gotten wrong.
Pope Leo III ordered his northern allies and erstwhile protectors to desist immediately from using the filioque in the Creed. The fact that they had been doing so for generations, he observed, was irrelevant insofar as it was a violation of universal church order. Then, to teach the Franks a lesson and make his continued allegiance to the Byzantine East clear, the very pope who had crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter’s Basilica commissioned an elaborate pair of silver shields to be forged. He ordered engraved upon their faces—in Latin and in Greek—the Nicene Creed without the filioque. Leo then had these “shields of faith” mounted inside Saint Peter’s Basilica, the most prominent church in Rome, on the tomb of the Apostle Peter—the most prominent place in that church ….
I believe the silver shields are still there, but the Western Church continues to violate universal church order by reciting the creed with the filioque.
Anselm’s atonement
The broad acceptance of Anselm’s logic speaks to the extreme legalism and the radical departure from apostolic Tradition that had developed in the medieval West. It is ironic that Anselm’s conclusion was so readily accepted in the West. The Catholic Church affirms the development of doctrine and holds that medieval and scholastic theologians understood the faith and expressed its concepts in a manner superior to that of the Fathers. And yet Anselm’s theology is crude, faulty, shallow, simplistic, and manifestly inferior to the understanding of salvation among the Church Fathers. It can hardly be considered superior to or an improvement on their work.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I’m pretty sure that she had Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo in mind.
Chastity
And what about chastity? It’s a basic truth of Christian discipleship. And it does not mean, “Sorry, no sex for you.” Rather, God asks us to live our sexuality virtuously according to our calling. For some this means celibacy, setting aside marriage for love of the larger family of the Church and a different form of fertility in service. For most people, though, in most times, it means sexual intimacy within marriage.
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection.
[I]n the American university system the vast expansion of DEI apparat simply follows the previous (and not yet complete) expansion of the mental-health apparat, all of which siphons resources away from the teaching of students. But that’s okay, because almost no one — least of all students and their parents — thinks that learning is the point of university. The university is for socialization, networking, and credentialing, and I expect to see a continuing expansion of the bureaucracies that promote these imperatives and a corresponding contraction of the number of teachers. And anyway, insofar as teaching and learning remain a burdensome necessity, if an annoying one, much of that work can be outsourced to ed-teach products and, now, to chatbots.
Genuine teaching and genuine learning will always go on, but for the foreseeable future it will happen at the margins of our universities or outside the universities altogether. Meanwhile, the symbolic work of the party-state will grind on ….
This meant bringing together supporters and opponents of slavery. (Not free and slave states: in 1776, every state recognized slavery. The Betsy Ross flag shows us thirteen stars in a circle, and every star represents a slave state.) Some of the colonists disliked slavery; others were very attached to it. In consequence, the Declaration adopts a political theory that has no direct implications for slavery: it is about the rights of insiders and focused on the question of when the governed may reject the legitimate political authority of their governors.
What the 1619 Project is, really, is the extreme progressive version of the standard story: it tells us that we have fallen further short of our ideals, more frequently, more consistently, and more deliberately than we realize. Yet it still tells us that “our founding ideals” were written in 1776—and it is still a profession of faith in them, of faith in an America we can work to perfect.
From Tuesday more motorists must pay to drive in London. The Ultra-Low Emissions Zone—in which a surcharge applies to high-polluting vehicles—will be expanded to all 32 boroughs of Britain’s capital. The £12.50 ($15.75) daily levy will cover diesel cars and vans that do not meet “Euro 6” standards (typically those bought before 2015), and cars that don’t meet “Euro 4” (which typically predate 2006). A scrappage scheme has been introduced to help owners of non-compliant cars buy greener vehicles.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, argues that the move will improve health, especially of children. But it has provoked a fierce backlash, particularly among drivers who live in peripheral parts of the city. That has been seized upon by Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, which has had a hard time winning votes in London in recent years. The party is now portraying Labour as anti-driver. Some vigilantes have vandalised the cameras used to enforce the clean-air scheme.
The Economist’s World in Brief 8/29/23. A thousand takes on this story could be, and probably are being, written. I noted it for the trajectory of western governments and to note that another publication might have used “protesters” where the Economist chose “vigilantes.” After all, it’s “mostly peaceful,” isn’t it?
Travel
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
Professor Lynn Wardle has shown that the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution approach to fault has serious inconsistencies. If one party squanders family wealth, this fact can be considered in the property settlement, almost like an “economic fault.” Allegations of assault, battery, or abuse of the children can be handled as criminal acts.
So, if the ALI’s Principles still effectively permit the consideration of economic faults and abuse faults, what does no-fault amount to? It means that the major fault removed by “no-fault” was adultery or sexual infidelity.
(I gritted and ground my teeth through this book not because of its substance but because of a style I found grating. Caveat emptor.)
Tortious spam filters?
U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta granted Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming the company’s Gmail spam filter unfairly suppressed RNC messages. “While it is a close case,” the judge wrote, “the court concludes that … the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC’s messages into Gmail users’ spam folders, and that doing so was protected by section 230.” As Sarah wrote last year, Republican fundraising appeals are likely flagged by spam filters at higher rates due to abuse of email lists.
The prison population roughly doubled during Reagan’s years in office, from 329,000 Americans in jail in 1980 to 627,000 in 1988. This trend accelerated during the Bush and Clinton presidencies. By 2008, there were 1.6 million people in American prisons, with the US leading the world in total prison population and imprisonment rate.
Jon Ward, Testimony. That should be enough to make anyone think twice, two or three times, about how “free” we really are.
Politics
What is this “white trash”?
Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”
Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury (I have not read this book but ran across this quote anyway.)
Manly men
[Ted] Cruz is one of the many singing the totally-normal-and-not-at-all-weirdly-homoerotic praises of Donald Trump’s recent Fulton County Jail mugshot: “Trump’s mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo. It’s going viral, and it’s making a heck of a statement.” Jesse Watters of Fox News, affirming his “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” said of Trump: “He looks good and he looks hard.”
In reality, Trump looks like the Grinch after a makeover performed by John Wayne Gacy—I’d love to know what the last man booked into that jail while wearing that much makeup was charged with, and I’ll bet it was hilarious—but it is of interest to me what these guys with their unblemished records of heterosexuality think looks and seems tough. Donald Trump is a guy who has never lifted anything heavier than money and blasts Broadway show tunes and the Village People at his rallies for totally normal people who are by no means members of a cult. I don’t know how much time you can spend dancing to “Macho Man” before your record of heterosexuality gets a blemish, or at least a footnote. And then there’s the inevitable playing of the music from Cats.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society.
Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.
So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community ….
I don’t often recommend poetry, but Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, caught my ear in a podcast reading, and is notable in the context of Illich for its call to humbler ambitions.
Segregated sports
I had no idea that chess routinely holds separate men’s and women’s competitions, and that the women overall are objectively worse than men. See Frank Haviland, Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians for a fascinating and possibly illuminating treatment. I’m still scratching my head.
Since Employment Division v. Smith in the early 1990s, we’ve been living under a constitutional regime which, viewed from a galloping horse, looks quite a bit less favorable than prior law for religious exemptions from some laws. So long as a law is neutral and generally applicable, one isn’t entitled to a religious exemption however strong one’s beliefs or weak the governmental interest in making the law.
But when you slow down and look closer, the concept of “neutral laws of general applicability” keeps tripping up rulemakers, as they keep creating loopholes for some but not for none. Sometimes, the loophole is as big as “we can make exceptions case-by-case.” In others, it’s gerrymandering the law to target a disfavored religious practice, as when Hialeah Florida tried to hobble the animal sacrifices of Santeria while permitting Kosher slaughter.
So I was gratified to see the religion-friendly ending to a case I’ve watched, on and off, since its 2017 beginning, Country Mill Farms, LLC. V. City of East Lansing, where the City of East Lansing excluded Country Mill Farms from its farmers market because it refused, at its own facility, to host same-sex weddings. Click the link for Euguene Volokh’s fuller description.
Politics
My Man Mitch strikes again
We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts.
The most interesting act out of the 126 acts laid out in the indictment is the first one. It reads:
On or about the 4th day of November 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP made a nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election. Approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual 1, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
The most significant claim here is that Trump always planned to cry, “Fraud!” if he lost regardless of the evidence. This is not a shocking revelation, given that he has a long history of preemptively saying that the only way he might lose anything is if his opponents cheated or rigged the game.
More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.
(CBS News, Emphasis added). “True information”! Words have lost all meaning!
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
I roll my eyes every time I see the conspicuous virtue signaling at coffee shops that fly the rainbow flag, but if I like their coffee, and they treat me nice as a customer, why shouldn’t I be prepared to tolerate that as the cost of living in a tolerably decent, not to say pleasant, society?
This quote comes from one of the usual suspects and expresses my feelings pretty well.
The most intensely-pondered version of my own toleration began last Spring, when the Artistic Director of a chorus I sing in announced our performance season for 2024-24. Our Fall concert was to be an unfamiliar contemporary Oratorio called Considering Matthew Shepard. If you’re unfamiliar with the Matthew Shepard story, here’s a fair synopsis from Wikipedia:
Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.
Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard’s death. Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard’s sexual orientation played as a motive for the crime.
The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney’s defense counsel countered by arguing that he had intended only to rob Shepard but killed him in a rage when Shepard made a sexual advance toward him. McKinney’s girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him. Both McKinney and Henderson were convicted of the murder, and each of them received two consecutive life sentences.
…
A few hours after Shepard was discovered, his friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout began to contact media organizations, claiming that Shepard had been assaulted because he was gay. According to prosecutor Cal Rerucha, “They were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating Matthew Shepard is gay and we don’t want the fact that he is gay to go unnoticed.” Tina Labrie, a close friend of Shepard’s, said “[Boulden and Trout] wanted to make [Matt] a poster child or something for their cause”. Boulden linked the attack to the absence of a Wyoming criminal statute providing for a hate crimes charge.
That ill-founded conclusion (note: I don’t blame the young friends for trying to make sense of the shocking crime) went viral and remains extant to an extent that I call it the Matthew Shepard myth. It’s powerful enough to have led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
But a gay author who investigated concluded that Matt was a methamphetamine dealer who knew his killers, and the murder was a drug transaction gone awry. As noted above the prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. So “the Matthew Shepard myth” is mythical in at least two senses, including the one that connotes falsity. That’s my take.
Now, back to last Spring, when our upcoming season was announced.
I brushed the dust off my priors about the Matthew Shepard myth, looked again, and came to the same conclusion as before: the homophobic hate crime version is probably false. But it’s entrenched, and powerful; it’s Matt’s “Legacy”, and used occasionally as a bludgeon on anyone reticent about supporting the constellation of changes encompassed in the shorthand “the gay rights movement,” as am I.
Apart from that legacy, I’ve no doubt that Considering Matthew Shepard never would have been written. Could I in good conscience sing it?
I found a streaming audio recording of it (by a group the composer directs) and pored over the libretto. I found a pleasant composition with a libretto that paints “an ordinary boy,” the bereavement of his parents, a coy hint that the Jesus he’d come to know in the Episcopal Church had been with him as he hung comatose on the rural fence to which his attackers tied him, and the reality that he’d become a symbol. I found a slightly hyperbolic portrayal of the demonstrators at Matt’s funeral from Westboro Ba***** Church (the demonstrators didn’t literally cry out Kreuzige!). But I did not find the piece propagandistic per se (i.e., in and of itself); any propagandistic effect is contextual, from the reality I noted in the preceding paragraph.
I also thought of a few chorus members who are jewish, one California import who was astonishingly ignorant of the basic Christian story, and of untold numbers who probably had zero Christian commitment of any sort, orthodox or otherwise. These folks have joined in repeatedly in singing masses, passions, Christian oratorios, Christmas carols — the great music of the formerly-Christian West — without complaining that the music would never have been written had the Christian story not taken root. So too their families in the audience.
So I’m singing the Matthew Shepard oratorio, much as I preferentially buy my commercial coffee at a chain famous for pacific northwest progressivism. It seems like the cost of living in a tolerably decent society.
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Growing up, I remember that my parents’ rule for me playing youth sports was that I couldn’t play in any league that required practices or games on Sunday. And, at the time, that ruled out most youth sports in Lincoln. So I played flag football for two years, I think, and I did a year of micro soccer and that was about it, aside from the hockey league our church ran for a short time. We were in an extremely conservative fundamentalist congregation and yet even in a church like that, our family was weird. There may have been others with similar rules, but I don’t recall knowing anyone else with kids who wanted to be in youth sports who had such a rule. Even in fundamentalism, youth sports were a kind of untouchable element of life for many.
So: Shift away from general ideas about “being too busy.” Instead focus on a specific category—families who make it to church when their kids’ youth sports events don’t get in the way. If I said there are more people who dechurch for reasons such as prioritizing sports ahead of church than there are who leave over corruption, would that seem more plausible to you? If I suggested it to your pastor, would it seem plausible to him? (The answer is “YES, OF COURSE IT WOULD.”)
Rarely if ever in the course of doctrinal controversy did anyone say something like this: “You’re right-I lack the Holy Spirit’s guidance in my reading of scripture, and I see that you have it in yours. I admit I was mistaken, so I’ll trust you instead.”
“So much of our religious anxiety is really about having to figure out how we can avoid doing the things we know we must, while still being obedient to God. We become religious minimalists, giving God only as much as we need to do to appease him, while keeping as much as we can for ourselves. This, as opposed to desiring as God himself desires. This, as opposed to living in reality.”
In the traditions of ancient China, the western spiritual seeker can learn the basics of spiritual life which the churches failed to teach him: how to be free of compulsive thinking and acquire stillness of thoughts, how to cut off desires and addictions, and how to conquer negative emotions.”
Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao. I probably quote Christ the Eternal Tao too much, but I find it that paragraph too penetrating not to repeat it.
Reason in a materialist world
Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.
There was a time when Lutherans would not have invited a Catholic archbishop to this kind of event, said Cordileone. There was a time when it was rare for Catholics to cooperate with evangelicals and other believers seeking common ground on moral and social issues.
“To tell you the truth, I actually long for the good old days when we used to have the luxury to fight with each other over doctrinal issues,” said Cordileone, drawing laughter. “But right now, the ship is going down. … The crew cannot afford to stand on the bridge and discuss the best kind of navigation equipment to use — when the ship is going down.”
The “ship,” he stressed, is not the church — “It’s our civilization.” If clergy cannot work together to defend ancient doctrines on marriage and family, while also striving to convince their own flocks to live by them, then “our civilization is … hanging by a thread.”
Our belief is that man is created to be in communion and union with God, and that if he rejects this communion, he will not become a human being in the authentic understanding. Apart from God a “normal man” cannot exist. The state of the man who has cut himself off from God is abnormal. Thus, the meaning of our belief in the “Image” is that God is the center of man’s existence. In other words, the divine element is what defines our humanity.
Metropolitan Saba of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
What are we here for? What’s the point? What is the purpose of worship? Interestingly, Wright’s answer is the same for both questions: “What we’re ‘here for’ is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made.”
James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love
Myth & Cosmology
“So are you saying that mythology and cosmology are the same?”
“I use the words interchangeably in my writing,” he says. “Myths are a kind of cosmology in that both words express an outlook on, or a view of, the world. They are not just tales about the gods.”
[T]wo rival conceptions of religion[:] Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s?
Inner watchfulness is a primary element of our life in Christ, and far more important than following outward events. Our Lord makes this abundantly clear when He says that His second advent will be apparent to all. Our foremost need, then, is to keep watch over ourselves all the time.
I heard, particularly when I was a Protestant, complaints that “I never heard the Gospel until” [I visited my present church], although I knew that substantially the same Gospel was preached at the Church they left as in the one they now attend.
We all hear important truths many times in our lives, but it is only when we are ready for them that they penetrate.”
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I probably should mention that I have resumed Journaling in DayOne. I’m a bit more candid and introspective in my Journal than here, but it also now includes some whimsy that might over the last few years have wound up in this blog — or that might end up both places.
Bottom line, this blog may change in content and frequency. Since I blog for fun, for free, and maybe for an eensy-weensy bit of influence, I feel no guilt over that, but more discerning readers might notice a shift and friends who read this might wonder if something’s wrong.
Culture
Watch what I do, not what I say
James Hill: “Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in Paris to have lunch at his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. During the 15-minute stroll home, as he kept telling her that he was no longer interested in photography, only drawing, he took three rolls of film on his Leica.”
Why ROGD is the worst fad ever
Of the gender transitioning of minors:
Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from this. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced.
A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.
Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’ talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.”
There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels, that it is because they’ve transed their child. So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them. But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natal males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.
They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on. And I’m the one that has to be bullied to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I’m sorry to say, because they’ve everything to lose, and it is a fight to the death as far as they are concerned.
Helen Joyce, quote by Jonathon Van Maren, Transgender Movement’s Last Defenders: Parents Who ‘Transitioned’ Their Children. I suppose your mileage may vary, but I found that a wonderfully succinct summary without being uncharitable to parents who, with no malicious intent, truly have helped sell their kids a bill of goods with no return address.
More from Van Maren:
Having a ‘trans kid’ these days is like getting your child into an Ivy League school a couple of decades ago—it’s a status thing. Often parents—mothers in particular—rush to post about their child’s transness on social media, choosing to out them without their permission and often lock them into an identity before they’re old enough to comprehend what’s going on. Children ‘transitioned’ at a young age have the deck stacked against them if they want to ‘de-transition’—not to mention tremendous public, peer, and parental pressure.
Magyar is unique because Hungarians are unique
Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family, “Just,” one of my new friends told me, “as English belongs to the Indo-European.” He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish. “How close?” “Oh, very!” “What, like Italian and Spanish?” “Well no, not quite as close as that …” “How close then?” Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “About like English and Persian.”
The social network formerly known as Twitter added a five-second lag to links from sites owner Elon Musk doesn’t like (such as The New York Times and Substack). Once journalists noticed this and asked about it, suddenly the lag disappeared. In other notes on an erratic boss, Musk apparently reached out through a mutual friend to meet with popular business podcaster Scott Galloway, who declined the invitation. Suddenly Galloway was locked out of his Twitter account and has remained so for more than two weeks.
Chicago community group called Native Sons that is working to stave off gun violence recently put out a plea to gangs: please commit your shootings at night between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. when there are fewer innocent bystanders to accidentally kill. “We have to start somewhere,” group co-founder Tatiana Atkins toldCWBChicago. I guess that’s true. But if you’re gonna do one ask. . . . Also: I don’t know if people who shoot other people will sign up to do that in time slots.
Meanwhile, in D.C.’s Ward 8, the only grocery store might close. It’s hemorrhaging money each month because of theft.
After negotiations, UPS drivers have a new contract. And they’re going to be making an average of $170,000 a year. We love to see it.
Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song. You’re gonna be okay. I feel like between this and “Try That in a Small Town,” we’re in a liberal music moral panic not seen since—well, since Mom took away my Eminem CD.
I’d add to that last one a note to the “conservatives” who are valorizing Rich Men North of Richmond (lookin’ at you, Dreher): Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song, and the singer, who has better sense than you, doesn’t want to be your Messiah. Leave him the heck alone.
Dimwit foes of the Categorical Imperative
If the new right prevails and either defeats or transforms the conservative legal movement, it will not like the world it makes. Degrade the First Amendment, and watch your freedom depend entirely on your political power. You”ll end up banning ideas you dislike in jurisdictions (like Tennessee) where those ideas have little purchase and empowering those ideas in jurisdictions (like California) where they command either majority support or majority acquiescence.
Or, to put it bluntly: If you can ban CRT in one school, you can compel it in another, and heaven help the professor who tries to stand in the way.
In a country with expressions like “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a reminder like this should be unnecessary. But it is, because we’re about as bright as geese or ganders and our “Christianity” is mostly a heretical or grossly schismatic mess.
Political and politico-legal
Trump chickens out
I get why Mr. Trump isn’t eager to climb into this sandbox. Debating is hard, and he is out of practice. He participated in only two debates during the 2020 cycle, the first of which was the stuff of campaign legend — but in a bad way. (Proud boys, stand back and stand by!) At some point during Wednesday’s two-hour event he would need to talk about something other than his grievances. He hates doing that, and has always been kind of lousy at it.
Let’s say, to expand on David and Sarah’s analogy, the staff of The Dispatch decides to get into the kidnapping business. At an “editorial” meeting I bark out orders: “Okay Drucker, you get the duct tape. Isgur, you find us a good nondescript getaway car. Hayes, just keep eating cheese curds until we find something for you to do.”
Drucker gets the duct tape, Sarah gets a sweet AMC Pacer with a tricked-out engine. Hayes provides encouragement. And then we head out to kidnap George Will and hold him for ransom. (“He’s a national treasure! People will pay for his release!”)
When we’re inevitably caught and charged, I won’t have many defenders. But Isgur and Drucker fans might say, “Oh, so buying a car or duct tape is a crime now!? Come on!”
Buying such items isn’t a crime, but buying them in furtherance of a crime is evidence that you committed the crime …
…
With that bit of legal pedantry out of the way, let’s get to the point. There are a lot of acts in the Georgia indictment that are not illegal in their own right but are part of a broader criminal scheme that is—allegedly—illegal. So, Trump’s tweets and speeches are not crimes in themselves, but they are evidence toward proving the larger alleged “criminal enterprise.”
Treppenwitz is a German word meaning ‘stairway joke’. It’s a word for the joke or comeback you think of way too late – on the stairway as you’re leaving the building. I often experience the pain of a missed Treppenwitz.
John Siracusa writes about “the plumbers problem,” a phrase he created.
“The Plumber Problem” is a phrase I coined to describe the experience of watching a movie that touches on some subject area that you know way more about than the average person, and then some inaccuracy in what’s depicted distracts you and takes you out of the movie. (This can occur in any work of fiction, of course: movies, TV, books, etc.)
What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations.
David Freund, historian of race and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park (via Jesse Singal)
Haplogroups
A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: …, haploûs, “onefold, simple” and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphismmutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together.
I am too weak in science to say what, if any, is the relationship among haplotypes, haplogroups, and the “inherited characteristic” component of “race” in the prior item. But apparently haplogroups are a necessary qualification to the assertion that race is a complete fiction.
That said, take this as a possible analogy: “race is a complete fiction” is to Newtonian physics as haplogroups are to quantum physics. The practical import is that unless you’re a geneticist or some such, it’s fine to live your life thinking of race as a complete fiction.
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.
… My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.
Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.
It’s that mythical place where New World people come to lead different lives. For centuries, and no matter how much it has changed, Europe, for us, has meant art and architecture, science and philosophy, fashion and fame, sex and perfume — and some connection to the past that, in an unbridgeable way, is unavailable to us back home … To come abroad is to understand yourself as a product of your own culture, and to see just how specific that culture is. So much of what I thought of as my personality — whatever made me different from other people — turned out to pale in comparison with what made me similar to other people, especially other Americans.
I’ve written here about how living in a small country for a length of time has revealed to me how the US throws its weight around in ways that strike me as bullying. Just today The Interceptreports on a secret Pakistani document purporting to reveal US pressure to remove prime minister Imran Khan (who was, in fact, forced from office) to punish him for being neutral towards US policy in Ukraine. That kind of thing really lands when you start to see the world through the eyes of others.
…
I meet young Europeans from time to time who can’t wait to get out of here and move to America, where they can have the fantasy life they imagine they can’t here. I try to dissuade them from their false impressions — its hard, for example, to make them understand how impossible most of the US, outside of a handful of East Coast cities, is to navigate without a car — but in the end, they should follow their dream if they have the opportunity to do so. What I find so interesting is that the thing that draws me to Europe — the weight of its history and culture — is precisely the thing that they want to escape by going to America. Who am I to say they are wrong?
…
[NB]one of these countries can absorb immigrants like America can, because the cultures are way too thick. Any American who thinks that European resistance to mass migration is due to nothing but racism is a fool who ought to have the experience of living here for a time. Assimilation is far, far more difficult here in these thick old cultures than in the thin culture of the United States. America is very different that way; most of the world is like Europe.
Yup again, though one need not live abroad to see the USA as others see it — something I began trying to do in the early 1990s by buying a world band radio when I was too poor (it’s all relative) and busy to travel. One of the blessings of the internet is the ability to get those other perspectives without leaving your armchair. You just need to care to do it.
Too good to last
The students weren’t allowed to take notes. At this stage the experience itself was more important than getting clear ideas and definitions down on paper for later. They had first of all, most of all, to delight and wonder.
…
Despite appearance, however, in their various meditations the professors were gently leading the students toward two goals. First, by pointing out so much beauty, they were bringing students in an experiential way toward the normal trust that the real is really real, delightful, mysterious, interesting—to wonder, as the program’s motto says …
The second goal was to bring students to the recognition that the Western cultural heritage could be a fountain from which to draw and not just a system to be dismantled …
Despite its popularity, a program so unapologetic in its embrace of traditional thought, values, and methods could not but find itself out of step with the priorities, agendas, and specializations of the modern research university. What’s more, in the eyes of administrators, an alarming number of students were converting to Catholicism. Some had even entered the monastic life! According to a summary report from an investigative committee, the program exhibited “a lack of tolerance for divergent points of view.” Through a series of bureaucratic manoeuvres and internal investigations, the program was slowly sidelined in the university curriculum and stripped of resources. Without the university’s support, and amid continuing hostility to its aims and purposes from administrators and professors, the program was shut down in 1979, not ten years after it had begun.
This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.
The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ+ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.
Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
Aaron Sibarium, a rising star reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, recently posted, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”
…
To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.
… To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise.
I don’t think there’s anything “obscure” or “online” about “no enemies to the right.” It’s been around long enough to have a French equivalent, pas d’ennemis à droite, and I suspect that the English version derived from the French. Moreover, don’t forget pas d’ennemis à gauche.
One who, as of mid-2023, insisted vehemently that an individual cannot change race, which is wholly a fictitious social construct, but can change “gender.”
(This definition expires 12/31/23 if not repudiated sooner by the progressive hive-mind.)
Legalia
Pro tip
I suggest that you skip commentary on the latest Trump indictment (Fulton County, Georgia) for at least 24 hours, to August 16, unless you love being misled by rash hot-takes.
After all, the indictment is very long, factually and legally, complicated, based in part on a state RICO law that differs from Federal RICO and probably from any other state RICO.
We really need a top Georgia criminal lawyer who isn’t on either team in this indictment to suss out the RICO implications in particular, don’t we?
Fraud?
In response to those who say (in response to the latestnext-to-latest federal Trump indictment) that “fraud” is limited to situations involving money or property; or who say that, “yes, there are cases holding that “fraud” is broader than that in §371, but we think this Supreme Court has been narrowing broad criminal statutes and we think they’ll narrow “fraud” in §371 if Trump is convicted under it”; I go out on a limb to say:
Lenity and other theories notwithstanding, if the Supreme Court narrows “fraud” under §371, it won’t be in reviewing a conviction of Donald Trump for his January 6 shennanigans. His behavior was just too wicked and the risk to the nation too great.
This is my foray into legal realism. And I don’t say there will be no dissents from upholding the (hypothetical) conviction.
Book bans
I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.
A telltale sign of the dishonest interlocutor is if they oppose your right to question them. Politicians who refuse interviews with the press, public health officials who demonize dissenters, activists who demand the muzzling of opposing opinions—such people are simply not to be trusted.
“You mean you’ve engineered the disturbances?” said Mark. “That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Feverstone. “But–what’s it all for?” “Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”
Most Times reporters now also rely on some form of encrypted communication, particularly messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp or the emailing service ProtonMail, to keep their sources and conversations confidential.
That is a remarkable shift. Encryption technologies became popular only a few years ago, after the former government security contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of what the United States government was doing to surveil its own citizens.
I’d love to make Signal my default messaging app and Protonmail my default email app, but too few people, inexplicably, have adopted them. (Hint, hint.)
If you say you don’t trust the government but aren’t encrypting your online communications, I don’t believe you.
Subsidiarity in a nutshell
When government takes over a space formerly held by intermediating institutions or citizens acting through the democratic process, they promise dispassionate expertise, neutrality and justice. But what they deliver is a replacement ideology and a big stick to enforce adherence.
… until I realized that anyone who answered at all (i.e., accepted the premise that Jesus fits on a political scale) is of dubious sanity regardless of the answer.
I want to add “orthogonal” to my vocabulary, and “Jesus is orthogonal to politics as we conceive them” seems apt.
Postscript
Failure of imagination
The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
There have been too many historical Jesuses—a liberal Jesus, a pneumatic Jesus, a Barthian Jesus, a Marxist Jesus. They are the cheap crop of each publisher’s list, like the new Napoleons and new Queen Victorias. It is not to such phantoms that I look for my faith and my salvation.
In the short run it causes me less conflict with other people, for I sympathize with whatever anyone may feel. It certainly requires less moral reflection, because I believe every sad story and give in to every tearful “I want”. It fits in particularly well with the inclinations of teenagers, who are discovering sympathy for the first time, find it as intoxicating as catnip, and love to hear sad stories of the heartlessness of the grown-up world. If they have not had clear moral training, it even seems to them to resemble the Golden Rule. “If I got pregnant, I know I wouldn’t want to have the baby; if I were gay, I know I wouldn’t want anyone telling me I couldn’t get married.” This property makes false compassion especially useful for corrupting the minds of the very young, stuffing them with false wisdom before the true wisdom has time to develop.
Both presuppositions-the assimilation of God to the natural world and the mutual exclusivity of natural causes and divine presence-are implicitly part of modern science as it is conceived and practiced, although both have long ceased to be active concerns among practicing scientists qua scientists. Both indeed repudiate central claims of Christianity as discussed thus far.
I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
A sensible reason for retirement from a prestige post
… writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister and poet George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
…
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
“A SPIRIT OF LEGALISM IS foreign to the Orthodox phronema, especially with respect to sin and our relationship to God. For the Orthodox, sin indicates spiritual illness. The imagery used of salvation is medical. A common title for Christ in Orthodox prayers is “the One who loves mankind” (Philanthropos). He is also often described as the “Physician of our souls and bodies.” His Incarnation restored our relationship with God by restoring fallen humanity to physical, mental, and spiritual health and wholeness.”
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Reading more poetry? That’s a great thing. Reading a book of poetry a day? That’s a 100% guarantee that you will get almost nothing from your reading. Better: Read one lyric poem a day, but read it five times.
It is a marker of impending doom that anyone could start a movement like reading a book of poetry per day as a tool of self-improvement. I guess being able to Tweet that or post a Facebook brag now passes for self-improvement.
Frankly, poetry bored me when I was young. Now that I know better, any tutoring I got in how to read poetry is long forgotten.
I now read poetry amateurishly almost every day, but I rarely read more than three pages in a row unless a single poem is longer than that. (Currently reading my first Geoffrey Hill, by the way.)
Nominal state, parastate redux
Related to my Tuesday post on “The nominal state and the parastate” is an extremely long post by N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval on how the U.S. and China are traveling separate paths to the common end of managerial totalitarianism. (H/T Rod Dreher). Unherd published a much-shortened version on the 9th.
It always hits me extra hard when two thinkers I respect spend hours and hours and hours writing long, thoughtful pieces, in much different ways, about a situation I’ve paid little attention to. Such are N.S. Lyons today and Matthew Crawford yesterday (as I write).
We need a law against debanking for thought crimes, and a constitutional right to use cash rather than digital short-cuts. I say that as one who uses those shortcuts a lot. But frictionless efficiency isn’t worth the downsides.
Put on your big boy pants and live with it
Yeah, sometimes you have imposter syndrome. And sometimes you feel like an imposter because you actually do suck at what you’re trying to do. Sometimes she’s not a narcissist, she just doesn’t love you the way you want her to, and she never will. Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier. But it isn’t and it doesn’t and there isn’t and you’re just another good, deserving human being filled with the pain of being alive. I’m sorry. I am genuinely so sorry. You wanted things, and you didn’t get them, and it hurts. You wanted to be something else, and you’re what you are, and it hurts. You thought life would be more than it is, and it isn’t, and it hurts. Me too. All of it hurts. So let it hurt.
Freddie deBoer, concluding what Alan Jacobs considers one of his best columns ever.
I re-read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce yesterday, and I’m struck by how closely many of Lewis’s “ghosts” fit the assumptions of Freddie’s “therapeutic/affirmational mode.”
The pander bear comes to NR
Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review has now twice published bullshitty misrepresentations of the latest Trump federal indictment. So says Ken White, a/k/a Popehat. I’ve haD to take Popehat’s word for it because my NR subscription lapsed and they won’t let me view diddly-squat there now. But now Johah Goldberg is having him on The Remnant podcast, so I can hear from the horse’s mouth.
So why might McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor like White, be doing a bad thing that looks like carrying water for Trump? Per White:
He’s not pro-Trump. But he’s anti-anti-Trump. He’s anti-Biden, anti-the-Department-of-Justice-pursuing-Republicans, anti-”deep state”) (well sort of), anti any application of the rule of law that might benefit Democrats. Plus, he’s very pro-the National Review being kept alive and relevant. The National Review is under siege from a frothingly crazy pro-Trump right, and if it’s not entirely willing to join the crowd, it’s certainly willing to indulge in deceitful critiques of anyone criticizing Trump.
Every word of that rings true. (Be it noted that I didn’t drop NR the better to pursue “frothingly crazy pro-Trump right” stuff, but rather to exit a kaleidescope of mostly-mediocre writing with no theme except pandering a little bit to every kind of conservative they recognize.)
Anthropologists in flyover country
[Walter] Kirn, for different reasons, worked the … territory for Time, GQ, and Esquire. “Knowing that I had grown up in Minnesota and then moved to Montana, my editors decided I would be their American correspondent,” he says. “I kept being asked to do these stories, which I started to feel were setups, in which I was supposed to make the safari into deepest, darkest America and come back with tales of how bizarre and ridiculous people were. And often they were bizarre and ridiculous, but not for the reason my editors thought.” Now, he says, “I don’t have to be defensive anymore, and I can actually, probably with a good clear conscience, show how bizarre everything is because I don’t feel I’m being asked to.”
It is no accident, says [Iain] McGilchrist, that the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution came along at more or less the same time. These are manifestations of a more disembodied, left-brain way of seeing the world. The entire modern history of Western culture—through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed—is what you get from an intellect that values quantity over quality, that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
It is hard to summarize a book as complex as The Matter With Things, a book of popular science and cultural analysis that is intimidatingly long … The argument goes like this: the picture of reality taken as objectively true by the modern mind, under the tyranny of the left brain, is, in fact, seriously distorted—and is killing us. This is something we all feel.
… The book is a powerful refutation of ‘nothing-buttery’—of the idea that reality is nothing but the sum total of its parts. It contends brilliantly that Occam’s Razor—the claim that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is probably the best one—is a cognitive tool with which the modern world is slitting its throat.
“These are not additional forces,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of operations for the Joint Staff. “These are forces that will augment what we already have there.”
transitive verb 1: to make greater, more numerous, larger, or more intense The impact of the report was augmented by its timing. 2: supplement She took a second job to augment her income
I watched the movie A Beautiful Mind completely unaware of the plot arc, so it left a big impression when, shall we say, the plot turned. So “beautiful minds” strikes me as a great deprecatory coinage.
Jeremiah 5:19
Because you served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land not yours.
Rightwing commentators seem to have realized that they won’t have George Soros to demonize forever, so they’ve started grooming Bill Gates to take his place.
Political ethics
[The Dispatch is] one of the last few right-wing media outlets in America that doesn’t celebrate ruthlessness as a political ethic.
“To grind through”. The Russian verb is being invoked by forces on both sides of the war in Ukraine.
(Via The Economist)
Believing blue, living red
Yes, on a number of fronts Americans have more culturally progressive beliefs than they did, say, in 1990, yet by the tens of millions, they have more culturally conservative lifestyles than the generation before. It’s a phenomenon somewhat clumsily called “believing blue and living red.”
This clearly is related to the phenomenon of “luxury beliefs.”
Conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership
… it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.
A Senior Trump Campaign Advisor explaining why they were 0-32 on court challenges of state presidential tallies. (Paragraph 25 of the August 1 indictment.)
Enormity
Before the 2020 Election, I thought Trump would leave the White House voluntarily if he lost. Anything else would be an enormity.
Caste privilege
History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.
Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, writing decades ago, via David Brooks.
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 