Category: Legalia

Saturday, 12/16/23

The Ivies

The Homer Simpson theory of censorship

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

The Right and Wrong Ways to Deal with Campus Antisemitism

Claudine Gay

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

Nellie Bowles

Rhetorical flights of fancy

…

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

…

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

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

I think the author knows that:

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

The ongoing treason of the intellectuals

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

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

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

Niall Ferguson, The Treason of the Intellectuals

Elites not fit for purpose

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

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

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

Dispossession

Stewardship as affront

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

…

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

Matthew B. Crawford.

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

Chastity as atavism

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

Helen Andrews via Rod Dreher

But leave a scrap

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Miscellany

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

Sundry madness

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

Nellie Bowles

School as Industry

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

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Counterculture

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

@Jonah

Bill Bryson describes cricket.

Politics

Trump II

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

Carlos Lozado

Vivek!

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

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

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

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

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Saturday, 12/2/23

A comment about my less-frequent blogging.

I’ve resumed, for several months now, use of my (digital) Journal and Common Place Book to collect many of the items I find amusing or that confirm my biases. A relative few of them I also still blog, along with items I judge are of more general interest than what gets logged only privately. That’s why I’m posting less total volume of material.

As this blog’s free for the taking, I don’t apologize, but wanted to explain.

Politics

The people

Character is destiny

Trump will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the “quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the beginning of all this, character is destiny.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Chuck Schumer’s Sister Souljah moment

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish official, gave a roughly 40-minute speech on the Senate floor Wednesday condemning the antisemitism that has exploded across the United States following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, calling it “a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.” The address, aimed largely at those on the political left, called out progressives who celebrated Hamas’ brutal attack and repeatedly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. “Many Jewish Americans fear what the future may bring, based on the repeated lessons of history,” he said. Meanwhile, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to appear before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5 to give testimony regarding antisemitism at their respective institutions.

TMD

The parties

Tone-deaf lefties

Voters want to hear how problems can be solved—not told they’re doomed unless obviously impractical steps are taken. And it doesn’t help that the Left’s version of the steps that must be taken includes a raft of unrelated social programs that would be nice to have but don’t do anything about climate change (see, for instance, the Green New Deal proposed in Congress). Nor does it help that obviously necessary components of a clean energy program like nuclear power are ruled out because, well, people on the Left don’t like nuclear power.

Ruy Teixeira, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

The dynamics of Left and Right

[W]e’re just really confused how people are not acknowledging that the democrats are just as in bed with corporate and pharmaceutical interests as republicans … I don’t know enough about psychology to say for sure why this has happened. Why when finally, finally, the Republicans are saying, “Woah, looks like the police are sometimes racist. We do need police reform!” the left had to then go, “Reform? Who said anything about reform? We need to defund the police!”… The truth is that neither party represents working class Americans. And these supposed “socialists” – what are they running on? Free college and banning fracking. It’s maddening.

Highly Qualified: What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?.

This is from some Readwise highlights. I have no memory of who linked to the original enticingly enough to get me there. I swear I’m not a regular at The Dandy, which appears to be for upstate New York elitist pot-heads.

Epigraph or epitaph?

When the history of this era is written, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about” should be its epigraph.

Nick Cattogio, quoting equivocally Anti-Trump Chris Sununu.

How reticent Republicans will come around to Trump

One of the shining lessons of the past eight years is that however low your expectations might be for Republican voters, they’re not low enough. Most of those on the right who should know better but have stuck it out this far will get to “yes” on Trump 2.0, I suspect. Some might do so after determined efforts at self-persuasion, but most will back Trump without much strain.

There are various rationalizations to which they’ll turn to resolve the tension between their nagging fear that Trump is a poisonous threat to America’s civic heritage and their partisan duty to believe that government by the far right is preferable to government by the far left—and that every Democrat is supposedly a member, or a puppet, of the far left. Those rationalizations are a strange brew of magical thinking and hard-nosed “binary choice” partisan logic.

…

[A] Republican-controlled Congress would either tolerate or actively enable Trump’s power grabs in a second term, the same way that congressional Republicans tolerated or actively enabled his aggressive deficit spending during his first term. We are very late in the game for anyone to still pretend that the GOP cares about restraining the federal government whenever they’re in charge of it, but that’s the sort of silliness in which one must indulge to imagine reelecting Trump as some sort of civic good.

Nick Cattogio

Mis-judging what “real Americans” want

Follow me for what is going to long like a sudden left turn: Do you know why the Republicans’ bad reputation on racial questions is a problem for the GOP politically? It isn’t because it costs them among black voters—it is because it costs them among white voters, of whom there are a whole lot more, many of whom do not wish to associate themselves with a party that is known (not without reason) for harboring politicians and activists with ugly and atavistic racial attitudes. These same voters—many of whom would be more or less on board with traditional Republican economic policies—are put off by other characteristics of the GOP coalition: its anti-intellectualism, its rural orientation, etc. That isn’t to say that everybody in the Republican Party is a rube on a turnip truck—but if you see a bunch of rubes piled into a turnip truck, you can bet that the turnip truck is going to have a “Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President!” bumper sticker on it. It isn’t going to say “Biden-Harris 2024.”

The Democrats have wisely offered themselves up as the natural political home of those upwardly mobile urban-suburban professionals the Republican Party doesn’t want. The Martin Center’s main man George Leef can sneer at the elite universities three times a week in the pages of National Review, but there is a great many young Americans who very much would like to attend one of those universities, and a great many middle-aged Americans who would like their children to attend such a school and who care a great deal about who gets in and why. But, even among people for whom Harvard’s admissions standards are not an immediate and urgent issue, the question remains: Do you want to associate yourself with the Ivy League crowd and the upwardly mobile strivers, or with the sneerers and scoffers who (though college-educated themselves, of course!) want you to believe that there’s a bright future in bumpkinism?

…

Republicans have spent the past 15 years or so micturating from a great height upon the aspirations of people who might want (for themselves or for their children) an Ivy League education, a high-paying job in technology or finance, a nice home in Silicon Valley or New York City or another big metropolitan area—in cities and suburbs that may not comport exactly with their politics on the whole but which offer (to everyone who is not a political monomaniac) many other important benefits, from economic opportunity to cultural interests to superior health care facilities. “Real Americans,” Republicans insist, do not aspire to such things—all Real Americans want to be farmers in Muleshoe, Texas, and diesel mechanics in Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Kevin D. Williamson

(Williamson suggests that the Democrats, too, are following policies apt to alienate strivers, but the Republican transmogrification is easier to caricature.)

So glad he solved that

How about it doesn’t matter whether progressives are liberals? We must move beyond the old labels. We are separated by rationalists and irrationalists.

What was once liberal is simply (as it mostly always has been) common sense, common decency, and management of inevitable change for the benefit of the general welfare and liberty and justice for all. Basically, what any reasonable and broad view of society would see as doing the right thing.

Almost anyone’s reading of social and political history would agree that we live in a better, more decent and fair nation because of the right things that rationalists did: abolish slavery, rein in the robber barons, establish labor laws, and approve women’s suffrage, civil rights, voting rights, Social Security and Medicare. The right things to do, which the irrationalists opposed.

In this new century social attitudes have changed, geopolitical power has changed, technology has exploded, the climate has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need and desire to do the right and decent thing. And there is only one side that continues that fight.

When we finally pull our heads above the surface of the water we’re swimming in, we might see that there is no longer a divide of right and left, red and blue, liberal and conservative; it’s one simply of right and wrong. Rationality vs. irrationality.

Mansplaining Texan’s letter to the New York Times

I read this as “Let’s do away with an imperfectly nuanced political spectrum in favor of this useless but self-flattering binary.”

Foreign follies

“Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

Culture

A brutalizing and stupid idea

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

A Matter of Principle

Less than a decade ago, I had high regard for “conservative” Hillsdale College. Its hiring of Michael (“Flight 93 Election”) Anton, who is at it again, together with the populist, rabble-rousing tone of its mailings, have brought that high regard to an bitter end.

Nevertheless, I’m in Hillsdale’s corner on this pernicious lawsuit. Hillsdale accepts no federal aid, but left activists, acting in the name of two co-eds who allegedly were acquaintance-raped by two Hillsdale men, are trying to impose Title IX processes on Hillsdale or else strip it of tax exemption.

SCOTUS sowed bad seed when it let the IRS strip Bob Jones University of tax exemption because of its odious policies on race. This is going to be a battlefront in the Left/Right wars for some time to come (and I have little doubt that the Right will try a tit-for-tat attack on some leftish nonprofits).

EA

Defined in these broad terms, effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?

…

This is why EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals. (This would seem to require a belief that prey animals dying of disease and starvation is superior to dying from predation, but ah well.) … [T]hose examples are essential because they demonstrate the problem with hitching a moral program to a social and intellectual culture that will inevitably reward the more extreme expressions of that culture. It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.

Freddie deBoer, The Effective Altruism Shell Game

Fox Porn

From my point of view, the case against Fox News isn’t that it is dangerous or that Tucker Carlson’s work is likely to incite anybody to violence. (Maybe it will, but I doubt it. This country may generate a few school-shooters every year, but I don’t think it has the energy for a sustained intifada.) The case against Fox News is that it is tedious, repetitive, and lurid. Aesthetically and emotionally, it more often resembles pornography than it does, say, the commentary of Paul Harvey.

Kevin D. Williamson (paywall)

They voted their lying eyes

We disagreed—and still do—with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism. 

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration. 

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they—the public—had not been adequately consulted.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus, The Death of the Old Europe—and the Rise of the Right

The horseshoe theory of politics

[Marx and Engels] write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical …

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter.

Alan Jacobs, Conceptual Marxism

The expiration of small-c conservatism

London has become its own country in a way, leaving the hinterlands further behind, its elites still gnashing their teeth about Boris and Brexit, while picking at their octopus starters. The prime minister is Hindu, the mayor of London is Muslim, and the first minister of Scotland is Muslim. The abandoned husks of churches contrast with the bustle of new mosques. This is a Britain unlike anything before.

And some of it clearly works: close your eyes and listen to young non-white Brits on the buses or trains, and all the accents and slang are instantly recognizable from my youth. The humor is still rich. Civility is fraying but still there. Crime is nowhere near American levels. The new Elizabeth underground line is marvelous. A city with the cultural cohesion of the Heathrow departure lounge somehow hangs together. The Brits are still a nation of high-functioning alcoholics and retain their strange, hysterical aversion to cannabis. It’s a miracle of multicultural harmony, but you can feel its internal tensions rising.

…

And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

Andrew Sullivan

Another new category for this blog

I once fancied that racism in the classic “dark people are inferior to light people” sense had largely vanished from the U.S. I conceded that racial stereotypes remained, but thought that even those fled in the face of a nicely-dressed darker person who spoke standard English — someone like, say, Thomas Sowell, Condoleeza Rice, or Barack Obama.

Birtherism and other bizarre attacks on said Obama persuaded me that I had been mistaken. People weren’t calling him [racial epithet omitted], but something dark and atavistic was afoot. Maybe I need to get out more.

I was less naïve about antisemitism, but it has so shamelessly reared its ugly head since October 7 that I’ve added it as a “category,” appearing today for the first time as such (earlier blogs no doubt had it as a “tag”).

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

Alexander Riley

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

Thursday, 11/16/23

Culture

Mind-bender

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

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

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

Strange congruence

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

Via Rod Dreher (emphasis added).

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

Magnificent scatological rant

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

City Lights go out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

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

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

Authoritarian, Totalitarian

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

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies.

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

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

Sarah Isgur: Haven’t found a better way.

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

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

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

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

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

Advisory Opinions

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

Half right

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

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

Political-ish

Looking back

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

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

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

Contrasting demeanors

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

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

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

Nick Cattogio, What Time It Is

I hope you don’t need my commentary on this

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

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

Via Damon Linker

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

Alexander Riley

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

Tuesday, 11/14/23

Middle East

Evidence is what confirms your priors

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide,” and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Andrew Sullivan

Culpably loose translation

At the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests and in various “We Will Not Condemn Hamas” letters from academia, there are a lot of Arabic phrases bandied about. A lot of Arabic words showing up on posters. And those words are a translation, of a sort. So: when it says Free Palestine in English, in Arabic it often says Palestine Is Arab. The phrase Free Palestine sounds nebulous and nice. And sure! Free Everyone, I say! In Arabic, it’s a little less subtle: Palestine Is Arab. Palestine is not Jewish. It’s a call for the end of Jews in the area. (H/t Matt Yglesias for pointing this out.) You see, the same translation in the big “Academics and Intellectuals for a Free Palestine” letter. There, in English, it says Free Palestine. In Arabic: Palestine Is Arab.

Nellie Bowles

One picture’s worth …

Via Nellie Bowles

Anti-Zionist, antisemitic

Anti-Zionists claim the moral high-ground and often take great offense at any suggestion they are antisemitic. 

But that’s the amazing thing. 

We spend so much time on that debate, everyone thinks it’s just normal to say, “I don’t think Israel should exist.” Because that’s what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish homeland. It’s not more complicated than that. Anti-Zionism is the idea that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish homeland.

Jonah Goldberg, How Anti-Zionism Shrugs Off Antisemitism

Moral clarity on Gaza

Barack Obama returns to the arena: Former president Obama jetted in from Martha’s Vineyard to say one quick thing, guys: the war’s kinda Israel’s fault! Or at least, we’re all guilty here, man. Hamas is the same as you and me. I’m reactive and need to learn how to take a deep breath before writing emails; Hamas tortured children and livestreamed it. Point is, we’ve all got issues. Here’s Obama: “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” It takes two to tango. Hamas killed infants point-blank; I never replace the toilet paper roll. 

You know who’s not talking like that? My woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who went on The View to deliver a shot of moral clarity straight into Stay-at-Home America’s veins. Here’s Mrs. Clinton: “Remember, there was a cease-fire on October 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery. It did not hold because Hamas chose to break it.” Moms around the country heard that call and are gathering arms. Hillary’s been through everything, so tarnished in battle she actually became clean again. I’m. With. Her, we all bellowed.

Trendy cultural relativists like 2023-era Obama can never really believe there’s a good guy. Nothing is ever better or worse than anything else. To the cultural relativists, Hamas is just another modern dance—a wild and beautiful expression of the human condition. The old-school feminists like Hilz are not so easily taken. They cut their teeth on brass tacks. They spend Saturday night preparing for the Model UN Conference, where they will crush. It does not take two to tango in the mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nellie Bowles

Abortion

Abortion in perspective: politique and mystique

The string of political losses since Dobbs overturned Roe has some thoughtful Christian conservatives reconsidering — and a few suggesting that their past writings have been vindicated:

Several years ago Matthew Lee Anderson wrote in these pages that there is no pro-life case for Donald Trump …:

If abortions happen because of the breakdown of marriage, then there is nothing ‘pro-life’ about electing someone who is at best a serial monogamist. If the abortion culture has anything to do with the wider degradation of our society’s sex and morals — as pro-lifers have argued it does for as long as I have been alive — then there is nothing pro-life in endorsing a candidate who has bragged about the number of his sexual partners. It matters that Trump is unwilling to answer whether he personally has funded abortions. It matters a great deal.

Let me be as explicit as possible about what pro-lifers supporting Trump means: It means lending their aid to someone who (with Bill Clinton) was friends with Jeffrey Epstein who was eventually convicted of pedophilia. And Trump knew of it and commended Epstein. I mean, look at this glowing endorsement: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Think about that for a second: Conservative evangelicals and other pro-lifers have rushed to find any justification they can think of to vote for a fellow who almost certainly knew of pedophilia occurring, and, for all we do know of him, did nothing to prevent it. At the very least, he was not the one who went to the police about it. That pro-lifers have been reduced to this beguiles the mind, to put it gently.

…

As long as our laws allow for the killing of the unborn we cannot claim to be such a society. But the erasure of such laws will not, in itself, absolve us of the charge of being a society that is deeply inhumane and hostile to life.

…

[T]his is what makes the embrace of Trump as a pro-life champion so damaging to the movement: It … diminishes the goals of the pro-life movement, reducing them from the lofty and inspiring ideal of creating a society hospitable to life down [mystique]to simply overturning a badly argued Supreme Court ruling [politique]. And by reducing the ideal in this way it actually drains the life from the pro-life movement, rendering it equivalent to any other political advocacy group whose sole objective is narrowly political in nature.

…

To secure an admittedly significant political victory the pro-life movement has had to give up this broader vision, for how can you credibly claim to resist the culture of death when your champion is Donald Trump?

Of course, that may be precisely the point. There may be no eulogy more fitting for American Christian conservatism than this: That we secured our continued relevance in American society by giving up the things that might have made us a distinctive society ourselves. We have gained a political victory but even if we triumph, what will we have to say? And can we say any of it with even a modicum of credibility?

Jake Meador, The Mystique of the Pro-Life Movement: On Trump & the March for Life, a reprint from January 24, 2020.

Why Abortion is a losing issue for the GOP

In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview … Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

David French

(Note the congruence of these two perspectives.)

Culture

Liberal democracy’s tacit orthodoxy

Liberal democracy has created its own orthodoxy, which causes it to become less of a forum for articulating positions and agreeing on actions than—to a much higher extent—a political mechanism for the selection of people, organizations, and ideas in line with the orthodoxy. This phenomenon can be seen especially in Europe, where in the past few decades there has been a major ideological rapprochement of the right-and left-wing parties. This resulted in the formation of what is called “the political mainstream,” which includes Socialists, Christian Democrats, the Greens, Social Democrats, Liberals, and even Conservatives. The mainstream that runs in Europe today is tilted far more to the left than to the right. Within it, the left has made a slight shift to the right in some matters (mostly economic) and made a further move to the left in other matters (mainly moral), while the right-wing movement’s shift to the left was huge.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Bittersweet resolution of nostalgia

(James Matthew Wilson ached for Michigan during his long exile:)

We had chosen a difficult time to return. Michigan had legalized recreational marijuana use in 2018, and cannabis shops had sprung up all over the place, with their ridiculous names and vulgar slogans appearing on billboards along the highways. The whole state has been defaced with bad puns on words like “high” and “stoned.” And in 2022, the citizens of the state voted to lock abortion rights into the state constitution. It also elected its first Democratic legislature in forty years, and in the short time that coalition has been in power, it has pushed through a slew of left-leaning programs that will further erode the moral and educational standards of the place—all done, ironically, in hopes of luring new residents to the state. Michigan risks becoming a state where the slaughter of the innocent and the drugging of citizens into inertia and schizophrenia are celebrated as pastimes. Its governor proudly speaks of these things as part of a golden vision of the future, alongside the construction of a new Chinese-owned plant for electric vehicle batteries.

These changes have given my family occasion to see why the love of country, the piety of Virgil, is so essential. When one feels betrayed or disappointed—or wounded by the legal establishment of grave evil—the loving reaction is not to withdraw but to abide, to recommit oneself to the saving of what risks being lost. “It is good that you exist!” Love sees through the faults and perversions of the hour. It stands firm, when other kinds of commitment or affection would crumble. This kind of love has to be wound about the bone and deep within the sinew, just as its vision of the object loved is not subject to present appearances. Our truest loves are not universalizing, free, and deliberate, but stubborn, unaccountable, and particular. We do not love immutability, eternity, or omniscience. We yearn to see God’s face, which we find in the human countenance of Jesus. The same holds for natural pieties, especially love of one’s home.

I have a favorite Michigan vacation destination, Traverse City, and agree with him on the “ridiculous names and vulgar [marijuana] slogans.”

What happened to the ACLU

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York City’s Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers’ side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own “reproductive rights” division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organization’s social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse “was not held responsible for his actions.” In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled “ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities” formalized the end of the old era. Due to “limited resources” and the ACLU’s need “to recruit and retain a diverse staff,” its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose “views are contrary to our values.” Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were “the potential effect on marginalized communities” and the “harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.”

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing “woke” lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

Helen Andrews, What Happened to the ACLU

Things at hand

Now if it is my inclination to tune out the national news, or if I claim that being obsessed with it is a sign not of engagement in the world but of a pathological boredom with it, I do so because I believe that, by comparison, what’s “at hand” is far more important. And I leave aside asking whether there are no Shakespeare plays or sonnets or Melville novels we haven’t read yet that we could go and read instead of glutting our boredom on Fox and CNN. Are we really going to surrender our attention to what the precious twenty-somethings on NPR believe we should care about when we ourselves can take charge of our own attention and attending?

…

I am not suggesting that anyone abstain from voting in presidential elections, though I confess to having abstained on grounds that seem perfectly reasonable to me: I didn’t want to be implicated in the shenanigans of either of the clowns on offer. But what I am saying is that there are duties of citizenship confronting us not once every four years but every day. And those who account themselves citizens because they vote in abstract elections but cannot be bothered by the “things at hand” are, in my view, not citizens in any sense of the word. They are people sitting on their couches watching the Super Bowl or the Election News, elbow deep in Cheeze Doodles, too busy being consumers of far-away news or sports to be citizens of the near-at-hand—citizens performing, at scale, the offices of neighbor.

Jason Peters, in an essay well worth a few minutes, Citizens of the Things at Hand.

Why is such advice so hard to follow?

Politics

Long-term consquences of Trumpism

One of the many tragedies of this era for the American right is how Trump and Trumpism have consumed young Republican political talent.

The most promising young governor in the party is being steamrolled in this year’s presidential primary, a casualty of Trump’s hubris and ambition. He may never recover from the ridicule he’s endured for his “disloyalty.”

Successful young(-ish) governors like Chris Sununu and Doug Ducey are either out of politics or soon will be, despite how formidable they’d be as Senate candidates. They ran afoul of Trump and therefore would struggle to get through a primary, so they’ve decided not to bother.

Smart young conservatives like Elise Stefanik converted to Trumpism for the same reason, to not run afoul of him or his voters. There’s little left to distinguish phony, opportunistic populists like Stefanik from true believers like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re rubber stamps for Trump in equal measure; the only difference is that one mutters sotto voce while doing the stamping.

Right-wing political stars now tend to be made from charismatic charlatans who are good on television, in the image of the party’s leader, not from policy mavens. Kari Lake and Vivek Ramaswamy are better known than most Republican officeholders despite never having won an election.

The closest thing Trumpism has to a next-gen political success story is J.D. Vance in Ohio. In unguarded moments, Vance sounds like a fascist.

That’s a lot of political capital that Republicans have spoiled or squandered.

Nick Cataggio

Our libertarian land

Ross Douthat

I don’t find this surprising at all. I think America is a pro-choice, pro-pot, and pro-gun society. I think the legalization of marijuana in Ohio is going to be a total disaster. But I think social conservatism is largely correct, and unfortunately, fairly unpopular, and that’s bad for the country. But such is life.

Michelle Cottle

Such is a democracy. So you’re saying you believe in thermostatic voting, more or less.

Ross Douthat

I think that America has shifted meaningfully to the individualist left on a range of, quote unquote, “social issues” over the last 20 years, including not just issues about sex and reproduction, but also issues like marijuana.

And I think guns falls into this category. One reason I think the liberals lose on guns in certain ways for the same reason maybe pro-lifers lose on abortion, where if you poll people about specific gun control provisions, they might support them, but they don’t trust Democrats because they think Democrats want to take away their guns. And in the same way, I think it might be that people who would support a 12-week abortion ban in theory don’t trust Republicans to implement it because they think Republicans want to just ban all abortions. I think there may be similar dynamics in play there, in a very libertarian country.

New York Times

Don’t say he didn’t tell us

“If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” – likely future president Donald Trump, to Univision.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Humpty Elon

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, via Goodreads.

We tweeted a line from Louise Perry’s remarkable essay, “We Are Repaganizing” (October 2023): “Abortion is not just ‘healthcare’; it is not at all like getting a tooth or a tonsil removed.” When we turned to promote the tweet as part of an X Ads campaign, the Ministry of Truth at X (formerly known as Twitter) informed us that the ad would not run. Its communication specified a violation of a policy that prohibits the promotion of health and pharmaceutical products and services. But the thrust of Louise’s observation is analytical, not promotional. It concerns what abortion is. Welcome to the Free Society™, brought to you by Silicon Valley. (Via First Things)

When we apply a rule, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less. The question is who is to be master — that’s all.

Living your faith

For me, faith is about uniting all people. It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who won re-election November 7, via E.J. Dionne and David Brooks.

If divine law and human reason condemn hatred of anyone who is “Other” simply because of who he or she is, then even more so do they condemn the irrational and too-often lethal hatred of the People to whom God first made his promises—promises, the Second Vatican Council taught, of which God has never repented (see Nostra Aetate 4). Jew-hatred that leads to cries of “Kill the Jews!” and “Gas the Jews!” is as clear an example of a deliberate choice that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible” as one can imagine. It is loathsome. It is a gangrenous wound eating away at everything from higher education to politics. It cannot be tolerated, and those who advocate such barbarities should not be tolerated either. 

For Christians to engage in any form of anti-Semitism is to add further blows to the smitten back of Christ, tied to the Pillar of Flagellation. It is to press more thorns upon his bleeding brow. It is to pound more nails into his hands and feet. It is to thrust another spear into his side. For he was and is, eternally, the Son of David as well as the Son of God, and to scorn his kinsmen is to scorn him.

George Weigel

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

Alexander Riley

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

Todd Rokita reprimanded

Good news for Hoosiers who appreciate good governance: our smarmy, showboating Attorney General, Todd Rokita, is today publicly reprimanded by the Indiana Supreme Court for disreputable extrajudicial comments.

Two dissenters thought it should be stronger than reprimand.

Downside: He’ll be deemed a martyr now and may never again lose an election in this red state.

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

David French

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

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

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

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

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

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

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

The Bunkinator

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

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

Stop Reading the News

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

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

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

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

The present madness

Gate-crashers

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

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

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

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

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

Boo-boo about BOBOs

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

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

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

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

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

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

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

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

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

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

Effective LARPing the dark side

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

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

David French

Radioactive

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

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

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

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

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

The Druids strike!

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

Hiatus

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

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

David French

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

Tuesday, 10/3/23

Culture

NETTRs and NETTLs

[Charles] Haywood says that if you want to call out someone on the Right, you should do it privately, not publicly. Sometimes, yes. But this is the exact same line of thinking that allowed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal to metastasize. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the enemies of the Church. Secrecy about evil — not moral misdemeanors, but evil — allowed it to grow in the darkened networks within the Church, until it was eventually exposed, and all but destroyed the Church’s moral authority. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the Left. Yeah, well, screw that.

Rod Dreher after playing a role in exposing a white-supremacist headmaster and teacher in a Classical Christian School, via Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve read enough to know that Charles Haywood personally adheres to No Enemies to the Right — i.e., he was not just assigned that side by the debate organizers.

I’m with Rod on NETTR (he’s against it), which has gotten me crosswise with Rightwing cranks occasionally. Lacking any notable national platform, the worst I’ve gotten was Judas accusations — nary a death threat. And since I was defending the truth rather than trolling anyone, that’s as it should be.

Odder than the Judas accusation, though, was a comment by a Jewish colleague suggesting that it took special courage to diss some outsider Klansmen (or was it Nazis?) who were planning a big demonstration downtown, as if I were breaking ranks and burning bridges. Sheesh! That sad misimpression illustrates why we need to rebuke the reprobate Right more regularly: so nobody will think it’s courageous for someone on the Right to repudiate racist terrorists and neo-Nazis.

The worst of the right wingnuts are those who wear a cross on their sleeves but prove by their commission of (or cooperation with) evil that it’s really about political power, not Christ.

We live in culture war hell. The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can’t stand. In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose. And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to “the other side” at all is to admit defeat. Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they’re so extreme as to be ridiculous. They’ll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right. 

I promise: you don’t have to do that.

For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.

…

As I write this, a minor controversy has erupted of just the kind that I’m talking about here: the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has recently banned the use of the word field to refer to an academic discipline, as in the field of history. This is ostensibly because the word field might make black students and staff think of slavery. What black person could ever avoid hearing talk about fields, real or metaphorical? 

When nonsense goes unchallenged because it’s perceived to be “on our side,” it metastasizes and spreads until suddenly, the majority of left-leaning people feel compelled to defend it. And ordinary people (that is, people not marinating in Twitter every day) will rightfully recognize the absurdity when they see it. 

I’m not interested in spending a lot of time chewing through social justice language or norms. But I do want to say this: It’s okay to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your side. I promise. You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice, and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The is the Left equivalent of No Enemies to the Right. I confess that for some reason I find it easier to spot NETTR than NETTL; maybe because that’s because I spend more time contemplating thought on the Right half of the spectrum than on the Left half, or maybe it’s because NETTL is no longer notable.

(Of course, I should note that the French may have gotten here first with pas d’ennemis au gauche and pas d’ennemis au droite.)

Yes, there are enemies to the Right

I will not let some redpill pick-up artist pimp become a role model to my sons or to other young men in my church because I refuse to rebuke them publicly.

Neil Shenvi, making the case against NETTR. Anyone tempted by the NETTR nuttiness should read the whole piece. He’s quite disturbed that young Christian men may be looking to filthy reprobates like Andrew Tate or Bronze Age Pervert for lessons on how to combat the woke Left, and I am too.

Flannery’s violence and grotesqueries

Her fiction, which employed violence and the grotesque, horrified her mother. “Why can’t you write something uplifting,” Regina would say, “like the folks at Reader’s Digest?” As [Flannery] O’Connor confided in a letter to a friend: “This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

Food culture

[E]veryone knows that old joke,

“Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

It doesn’t matter that America is not part of Europe, because to Europeans America is worse at everything (except war), especially food.

Chris Arnade, America does not have a good food culture

Guarantors of tranquillity and happiness

In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

High-Toned Gobbledygook

[I]t’s not anti-intellectual to say that the left desperately needs to lose its academic vocabulary, which is overwhelmingly influenced by trends in humanities departments at elite universities. 

That’s because it is incomprehensible to ordinary Americans. 

Students go through those programs and absorb a certain vocabulary, they graduate and go to work at nonprofits and in media and in Hollywood, and from there they spread the terminology. Social media, especially Tumblr and Twitter, helps ensure that this fancy vocabulary colonizes left-leaning spaces. Nobody wants to sound unsophisticated, so everyone adopts these terms even if they’re not particularly comfortable with them. Like seemingly everything in the internet age, it’s mimetic. And that’s how you get people talking about the role of Latinx intersectionality in queering BIPOC spaces in the Global South.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The Texas Pander Bear

Texas AG Ken Paxton, having dodged conviction in the Texas Senate after impeachment by the Texas House, is tacitly appealing to the Texas GOP base by filing a red-meat lawsuit.

Dump on Trump

On the off chance that one reader is MAGA but persuadable, I shall continue to dump on Trump for the foreseeable future.

Bankrupt Donnie from Queens

Trump’s business—as we New Yorkers always knew—was bilking people. Oh, he had a few slam-dunk construction projects early on, using his daddy’s money. And he did prove himself more competent than the City of New York when it came to completing the Wollman Rink in Central Park. But almost everything else crashed. He declared bankruptcy four times. He stiffed the small contractors who built his casinos. He stiffed his lawyers. The real property developers in New York—no shrinking violets themselves—told jokes about what an egomaniacal phony he was.

Trump only began to make money when he signed on as an actor playing a billionaire in a reality TV series. This enabled him to take the grift to new levels: he sold his name to overseas developers who slapped it on apartment buildings, he sold steaks and wine and bottled water; he used the money to buy golf resorts and a few buildings.

…

Trump is a fraud and also a traitor. He tried to overthrow our government. But he persists, an icon, because he doesn’t “sound like a politician.” Nice work if you can get it. And the Democrats can’t seem to understand that they will make little progress against him if they don’t address the issues that built his brand—the crisis at the Southern Border and the refugees in Northern cities, crime (Target is closing nine stores, including one in Harlem, because of rampaging hordes of shoplifters), the false pomposities of identity politics…and, of course, the fact that Joe Biden seems to be doddering.

Joe Klein, The Art of the Fraudster

Donnie from Queens is boring

Four years into his presidency, Trump isn’t boring in the way a dull, empty afternoon is boring. Trump is boring in the way that the seventh season of a reality-television show is boring: A lot is happening, but there’s nothing to say about it. The president is a man without depths to plumb. What you see is what you get, and what you get is the same mix of venality, solipsism, and racial hatred that has long been obvious. Trump’s abuses of the presidency are often compared to those of Richard Nixon, but Nixon had a deep, if troubled, interior life; one biographer characterized Nixon as struggling with “tragic flaws,” a description hard to imagine any credible biographer using to describe Trump.

Quinta Jurecic, The Tedium of Trump

There’s quite an illustration at the top of Jurecic’s article, too.

Flaunt/Flout

Donald Trump does not flaunt the rules of golf—that is a vicious lie.

He flouts the rules of golf—just as he flouts good taste, common decency, the Constitution, etc.

To flaunt something is to show it off: A rich man might flaunt his wealth, a beautiful woman might flaunt her beauty, one of those younger Kardashians I can’t tell apart might very well flaunt both. To flout something is to disregard it: Rolling Stone writers routinely flout English grammar and usage both.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Lapped by Trump

Poor Mike Pence. For one brief shining moment back in January 2021, standing in marbled majesty, gavel in hand, he did the Right Thing and refused to turn the Republic into a Fiefdom, which caused a mob of knuckleheads to storm the Capitol and send Pence running to an undisclosed location, but he stood tall for Rectitude and Devotion to Duty, and now here he is on the campaign trail making small talk in a Dunkin’ Donut shop with a couple of truckers trying to decide between the Caramel Crème and the Pumpkin Peppermint.

Poor Chris Christie. Once the Emperor’s Boon Companion, now his lone accuser, the former governor does his spiel for a crowd of six Starbucks sales associates on their vaping break who haven’t the ghost of an idea who this porky guy is.

Garrison Keillor

Wordplay

Banned Books Week

a cloying festival of liberal self-aggrandizement

Matthew Walther’s description of Banned Books Week

Confabulation

Confabulation is subtly different than I’d thought. I considered it casual, habitual lying about trivial stuff; apparently, it’s not considered lying at all.

So much for Joe “The Confabulator” Biden.

#Fail

She “sought forms that give shape to the infinite and spiritual dimensions ….”

A poet (Major Jackson) trying to describe the work of a thesophist artist.

The next GOP Vice-Presidency

like taking a job as cleaning lady in the Elephant Pavilion …

Garrison Keillor on Nikki Haley’s prospective Vice-Presidency.

Breaking butterflies on the wheel

breaking every butterfly on a wheel of confrontational rhetoric …

Rod Dreher (hyperlink added)

Jest

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Francis Bacon via Hedgehog Review 24.3, p. 9

Theo

The problem with a theocracy is everyone wants to be Theo

James Dunn via @ChrisJWilson on micro.blog

Philo T. Farnsworth

Tonight Show host Johnny Carson once quipped, “If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Hermit kingdom

Hermit kingdom: a characterization of North Korea in the Economist. It may not be novel, but it had fallen off my radar.

Undecided

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Laurence Peter, via The Economist World in Brief

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

David French

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

Monday, 9/25/23

Culture generally

Living with Autism

Lutz, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has previously written a book about her experiences raising a son (now an adult) with severe autism, goes on to lay out a fascinating history of this concept in the first half of Chasing the Intact Mind. She focuses heavily on memoirs written by parents of children with autism, showing how at every stage in the modern history of our understanding of this condition, such parents have pined for — and in some cases gone to herculean and frequently pseudoscientific lengths to free — the “intact mind” supposedly lurking behind their severely disabled child’s troubled exterior. It’s often quite difficult for these parents to accept that their experiences raising kids with severe autism, which can involve the everyday management of violent tantrums, obsessively repetitive behavior, and problems with toileting and basic communication, reflect not a temporary challenge that will be overcome, with a “normal” kid waiting at the other end of a journey, but rather simply who their child is and will always be. But sometimes, unfortunately, that’s the case.

Jesse Singal.

I selected this quote because it rings so true — even in the case fairly mild “on the spectrum” children. Of course, it doesn’t help if qualified doctors don’t give the blunt word “your child suffers Asperger’s Syndrome” (as was the current terminology for the child I”m thinking of). If doctors shilly-shally around with “we don’t know what’s wrong,” it’s understandable that parents would seek someone — heck, anyone — who says he does know.

Compelling governmental interests

[Escondido Union School District] contends that the government purpose of protecting gender diverse students from (an undefined) harm is a compelling governmental interest and the policy of non-disclosure to parents is narrowly tailored…. This argument is unconvincing. First, both the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court have found overly broad formulations of compelling government interests unavailing…. Second, keeping parents uninformed and unaware of significant events that beg for medical and psychological experts to evaluate a child, like hiding a gym student’s soccer concussion, is precisely the type of inaction that is likely to cause greater harm and is not narrowly tailored. ….

Mirabelli v. Olson (Southern District California, Sept. 14, 2023), via Religion Clause blog, Teachers Get Religious Exemption from School Policy Barring Disclosure to Parents of Gender Identity Changes

Nellie on the 15th

→ Working really hard to spin this: The New York Times is working very hard to somehow spin the migrant situation in New York and Chicago into being a problem Republicans caused. It’s hard. Biden is president and in charge of the border. These cities are all run by Democrats. But. . . there must be a way that Republicans created this. We got it! They hoped it into existence: 

I hope you’re happy, GOP, with all the families sleeping in gyms in Staten Island, just like you planned.

…

In Toronto public schools, to make it easier to ensure the books are equitable, everything written in 2008 or earlier has been removed from shelves. For real. It’s just too risky to have old books that might have old ideas written by the wrong type of author. And so, to make the so-called book “weeding” process easier, we’re not even looking past 2008. Goodbye to The Very Hungry Caterpillar and goodbye to The Diary of Anne Frank (I’m sure there are others, but really, are there?). The world began in 2009. We have no knowledge of what came before that year. Why are you asking about it? Why do you need to read a book from before then? Is it your homophobia? Is it that you hate Latinos? I’m just taking notes because it’s interesting that you’re so interested.

…

… Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a detransitioner who had a double mastectomy at 16 is suing the hospital. Literally, all these clinics need to do is wait until the kid turns 18.

Nellie Bowles

Miscellany

  • “The term ‘non-binary’ can be translated to Spanish as ‘no binario’ or ‘no binaria’ depending on the gender of the person,” – ChatGPT.
  • “Yale University has more employees than it does students. In fact, the school has 2.44 administrators for every faculty member, and one administrator for every four students. That’s the same ratio the government recommends for childcare of infants under twelve months,” – Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.
  • “I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story — that [Covid] came from a wet market where wild animals were sold — at face value. If I am honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview … [Steve Bannon and others’] over-the-top conspiracies fed our over credulity; their ‘question everything’ led many of us to not questioning enough,” – Naomi Klein.

Via Andrew Sullivan

What humanity as a whole needs

Although they differed on many matters, Dostoevsky, Danilevsky, and Leontyev did ultimately agree on one thing: the interests of humanity as a whole demanded that Russia not copy the West, but rather defend its own distinctive culture.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

In case you were wondering,

The claim that peaceful January 6 protesters have been held without bail, which has become widespread in some quarters of the right, is false.

Fact Checking Vivek Ramaswamy’s Claims About January 6 Defendants.

(If you can get the September 17 Doonesbury, do.)

Speaking of which, half my kingdom to anyone who can non-violently wipe that cheesy grin off Vivek Ramaswamy’s face.

Pop starlets

Terry Mattingly tells of interviewing Allison Krause early in her career and asking why she was sticking with bluegrass and with her band Union Station (I believe she’s been offered a very big pop music deal). Her answer, basically, was “If I go to pop, will anybody be listening when I’m 60?”

A related question for young pop starlets is “Will anyone listen if I don’t show a lot of skin?” For very few (I’m looking at you, Taylor Swift) is the answer “yes.”

(And that’s not a “clean bill of health” for Swift. I don’t know her oeuvre well enough to give it more than one tepid thumb-up.)

Self-refuting

[I]f you want to know how NOT to start a letter defending yourself from accusations  of antisemitism, you can use this letter as a model. After noting that the festival has been harshly criticized by “the Jewish Federation and the ADL,” the organizers have this to say:

unlike our detractors, we do not operate in the shadows nor among elite decision makers and funders. Rather, we value transparency and public access, accountability, and scrutiny. We are also acutely aware of the power disparity between these highly funded, connected and organized Zionist organizations versus our small cultural institution run by volunteers and student organizations, most of them Penn students.

Talk about self-owns… The organizers are so clueless about antisemitism that they engage in classic anti-Jewish tropes while defending themselves from charges of antisemitism. Which kinda undermines anything else they have said or will say in their defense.

David Bernstein, Despite What Those Shadowy, Elite, Rich Jews Say, We’re Not Antisemites, quoting Spokespersons for the “Palestine Writes Literary Festival” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Caution

A people that extends its empire too far from its base commits the sin of Onan and spills its seed upon the ground.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Slowing Down

Liturgy of the Mall

What the liturgy of the mall trains us to desire as the good life and “the American way” requires such massive consumption of natural resources and cheap (exploitive) labor that it is impossible for this way of life to be universalized.

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Necessity is the mother

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.”

Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul

Maybe lack of principles isn’t all bad …

Even if I don’t intend to keep the same pace as people here, I often just have to. In India, there’s none of that kind of stuff. The difference is as great as that between getting on a slow local train and getting on the bullet train.” When I ask her what she thinks the reason is, she says, “Well, the effect of the heat is one thing: India is hot. But don’t you think the principles they have are different? The focus of thinking in Japan is economics, or it has become that way recently. Even politics is more like a form of economics than an attempt to realize an ideal society. Politicians don’t have any principles in Japan.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Sexual Revolution

How do you measure success?

The other day, the Free Press sponsored a public debate on the question of has the Sexual Revolution failed? Rob Henderson writes:

…

The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom.

The answer to the debate description (“The sexual revolution promised liberation. Fifty years on, we ask: has it delivered?”) is obviously yes.

But the reason why a debate makes sense is because many people conflate liberation (freedom) with happiness.

The revolution has unquestionably increased freedom. But it also made people less happy. Many people, though, anticipated that greater freedom would necessarily bring greater happiness.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

We can’t have everything good all at once. We can have some good things, but we can’t have all good things at the same time.

…

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

(via Rod Dreher)

I disagree that “there’s no going back.” I have no quick fix or straight path back, but I suspect we will somehow go back — some day. But there are going to be a lot of children irreparably damaged meanwhile, because the sexual revolution is another of those luxury beliefs that the elites can more-or-less survive but which devastates millions when it trickles down.

Dreher, musing on the topic agrees with Henderson: “We’re going to have to ride this thing out till the collapse.” I’m not sure that’s all that different from what I suspect. I just deny that “the collapse” is the end of the world; it may be a pivot-point. Apropos of this theme, which I’ve sounded several times recently, see Nathaniel Peters, Living Well at the End of a World.

Children’s happiness, adult freedom

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

Rod Dreher, Sex, Freedom, Happiness

Poco Politics

Denizens of Delusionland

[W]hile 91 percent of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better off if they have married parents,” only 30 percent of college-educated liberals agree, according to a report to be released next week by the Institute for Family Studies.

…

One stunning and depressing gauge of racial inequity in the United States: The study found that 62 percent of white children live in low-poverty areas with fathers present in most homes, while only 4 percent of Black children do.

Nicholas Kristof. Every once in a while, it’s nice to see conservatives so clearly a part of the “reality-based community” with liberals off in Delusionland.

Gender vs. Sex

While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Sheluyang Peng, Immigration is religion’s only hope.

Occasionally, something like this pops up and makes me realize why some voters consider “Republican” Donald Trump the lesser evil compared to any Democrat.

Why such a hack?

Everyone knows that Kamala Harris is, as one writer put it, a “hack with terrible political skills.” Peggy Noonan, has what seems like a plausible suggestion of how someone who has ascended so high could remain such a political klutz:

She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.

Note: Gavin Newsom will be just as bad if elevated to national office.

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

David French

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

Thursday, 9/14/23

Culture

Building new kinds of stability

In a world where absolutely everything is unstable, from geopolitics to money and even the climate, some far-sighted younger millennials and Gen Z-ers are already pioneering a new model. Willow, a twenty-five-year-old writer based in rural Canada, married at twenty-three and is cocreating a domestic economy with her husband, Phil, one that is clearly an update of the premodern “productive household.” In addition to her writing projects, she does carpentry with Phil, roughly dividing the work into “first fix” (which requires more strength, and which Phil does) and finishing (which requires more patience and manual dexterity, at which Willow excels). Because they have a small baby, Willow cannot do much carpentry at present, but she is active in finding Phil clients and sometimes apprentices. Willow also tends a small farm on her and Phil’s property.

From an industrial-feminist perspective, Willow’s approach is unacceptably in thrall to patriarchy: She married young, views childcare as largely her domain, and is not the main money earner. Yet Willow is sincerely pursuing her interests as an embodied woman, in her relational context, rather than as an atomized, abstract “human” in an inconveniently female body.

Mary Harrington, Is There Hope for Marriage?

Thought about poetry

Free verse was all the rage at the time, with the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg also experimenting with the same pharmaceuticals and literary devices. Personally, I remain uncertain about the value of these creative detours. Poetry is meant to be the most distilled way to communicate. Does anyone think Ginsberg and the other Beats were able to distill their thought, or even put their fingers on it? To me, those fellows slowed thought down.

Constraints in poetry do a number of things. They discipline the writer—no small thing. They help the reader, and also, the rememberer. 

It is hard to memorize chunks of free verse, just as it is hard to remember large chunks of prose. There is a reason that almost nobody can say, “Do you know my favorite paragraph from my favorite novel?”—and then recite it.

Douglas Murray

Those grimy white cliffs

Chaplins Restaurant and Carvery in Dover, despite all the visible unhappiness is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying Jon, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through.

Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community built around a shared history and culture. Even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters.

That’s essential, and at a deep level Wall Street me didn’t understand. The English know who they are, and are ok with it.

Chris Arnade, Walking England’s Coast Part 1: From Dover to New Romney

Confusing comfort for civilization

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, British statesman, Conservative politician, writer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, via Life on Dover Beach

AI in medicine

AI without the ballast of intuition represents the tyranny of pure analysis. Unleashed, and without intuition to give it a more profound understanding of humanity, AI stands ready to extend the power of reductive and often dangerously misleading concepts.

Ronald W. Dworkin, Paging Dr. Bot

Subscribing to flatness

Most consumers don’t know that by using internet-based (or -generated) platforms—by buying from Amazon, by staying in an Airbnb, by ordering on Grubhub, by friending people on Facebook—that they are subscribing to a life of flatness, one that can lead directly into certain politics. But they are. Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives. It is not an accident that progressive ideas spread faster on the internet. The internet is a car that runs on flatness; progressive politics—unlike either conservatism or liberalism—are flatness.

Alana Newhouse, Everything Is Broken

Gut-punch

There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

“It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.

Louise Perry, We Are Repaganizing

Inflation and privilege

Both being retired persons now, my wife and I are taking our annual week in Traverse City, Michigan next week rather than June, as we used to. A friend who we’ll join up there gives a scouting report that our breakfast favorite (French Omelettes) is closed; they couldn’t afford to pay what staff needed to earn in a quite expensive city.

I peeked at the online menu of a surviving “fine dining” restaurant; this is going to be a fairly expensive vacation. That I can afford it is a privilege. That servers, cooks, busboys, dishwashers and such cannot means that my deliberately high level of tipping hasn’t been enough to make those jobs attractive.

Politics

Social imperialism

Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) sends out weekly missives detailing the machinations of activists at the UN to get abortion and LGBT-supporting language in treaties and formal documents of every kind; Marguerite Peeters described the phenomenon of how institutions were infiltrated and colonized in The Globalization of the Western Sexual Revolution (2012); sociologist Gabrielle Kuby did the same in The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

…

Nigerian human rights activist Obianuju Ekeocha described what the West has been perpetrating on Africa in her essential 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism in the Twenty-First Century as well as the 2019 documentary Strings Attached. So-called humanitarian aid, she writes, nearly always comes with strings attached—contraceptives, demands for the legalization of abortion, perverse Western-style sex education, and the replacement of traditional African values with post-modern Western ones. The desperate need of many African countries for Western foreign aid is exploited to push for the imposition of a top-down sexual revolution.
 
…

But the Guardian would have us believe that a few Christian groups are imposing their views on unwilling African populations, and that this is also serving as a testing ground for laws in Hungary and American red states. The brazenness of this level of gaslighting is almost impressive—but it needs to be called out. The truth is that rich Western countries are pushing the LGBT agenda and abortion in developing countries, promising them cash in exchange for their souls—but you won’t read that in the mainstream press.

Jonathon Van Maren, The Left’s Colonial Mission (The European Conservative)

As someone said, if a third-world country asks for a bridge, China will build them a bridge; the US will force some aspect of the sexual revolution on them and only then build a bridge.

Who do you think wins more hearts?

Newly-conservative?

Our unabashed dictionary calls a conservative a liberal who’s been mugged:

  • “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department. If you’re still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you,” – Shivanthi Sathanandan, Minnesota DFL’s Second Vice Chair, in June 2020.
  • “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS,” – Sathanandan, this week, after being violently car-jacked and beaten bloody in front of her children in Minneapolis.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

What if Biden bowed out?

More from Sullivan (see Newly-Conservative, above), begging Biden to bow out of POTUS24:

A new candidate would immediately shift the dynamic of the race. The Democrat would represent the future; and Trump the polarized past. A younger candidate would instantly reverse the age argument in the Democrats’ favor. The news cycles would be full of Dem debates, fights, campaigns and energy — and not dictated by the defensive torpor of a frail octogenarian, or the unending narrative of Trump against the corrupt elites.

…

Biden was elected as a means to check Trump; the logic of his presidency was always that the old man would get us back to normal; and that argument makes much more sense for a one-term presidency … there could be no worse legacy than handing the country back to the monster you rescued us from.

I agree. Trump’s secret weapon, maybe his margin of victory, is Biden’s manifest infirmity.

But any other Democrat is likely to be even more extreme on sexuality.

Superiority

Democrats who indulge in hubris are liable to assume and sometimes proclaim their innate superiority through their education or their modern morality. Republicans do it by exalting two particular types as superior: the businessman and the pious man.

Henry Olsen, The Three Deadly Sins of the Right (American Compass)

You’re not likely to get American Compass quotes here very often, but this seemed accurate and illuminating.

My problem with Theocracy

[I]n the Christian nation that Wilson and his allies want to bring about, there wouldn’t be much space for Christians like me to operate. He told the Washington Post that

while leaders would strive to ‘maximize religious liberty for everyone,’ Catholics are unlikely to feel welcome — ‘I think it has to be a pan-Protestant project,’ he said — nor would Christians who disagree with his stridently patriarchal social norms. … Asked to explain where liberal Christians fit into his theoretical Christian society, Wilson said they would be excluded from holding office, later noting similar prohibitions in early American Colonial settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When it was pointed out that Puritans executed Boston Quakers, Wilson said he would not “defend” the hanging of Quakers, but then argued it was important to understand the context of the time.

It’s gonna be fun to watch these old boys and the Catholic integralists go at each other, if either side can tear themselves away from their keyboards long enough to find their way to the field of battle.

Rod Dreher. That neither Douglas Wilson nor the Catholic Integralists have in mind a world hospitable to Orthodoxy keeps me at arms’-length from them. If I cared to, I could probably impugn their ability to govern wisely even by their own lights.

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

David French

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

Labor Day (observed) 2023

Public affairs

Vice and virtue redux

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?

TMD

Scientism

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.

John O. McGinnis, **Blinded by Scientism

From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Gun-in-cheek

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.

Molly Ivins, via the Writer’s Almanac

Profiles in something-or-other

Brian Kemp still has balls

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.

The Morning Dispatch

Antinomy or telos?

Consensus is the opposite of leadership.

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.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Thought-provoking

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Martin Heidegger

Epic Blurb

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.