[T]he gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values.
Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Tweeting in effect that he knows better than the jury who heard the evidence, and that he knows that this white man was merely “standing his ground,” not looking for trouble and finding it.
It took an Atlantic Ocean of distance to let the Economist spot this juicy bit of weirdness:
The convergence of broad “stand your ground” laws and more permissive gun laws is a toxic combination, says Kami Chavis, a professor at William and Mary Law School. Messrs Perry and Foster were both armed when they encountered each other, thanks to Texas’s lax gun laws. But there is an inconsistency in the logic of Mr Perry’s supporters, who say that he justifiably felt threatened and needed to act in self-defence because his victim was carrying an assault rifle.
If openly carrying a gun constitutes such a threat that someone can shoot you dead for it, why in the hell is it legal to openly carry?
I’m sick of the culture of vigilanteism created by these damned “stand your ground” laws, and open carry only makes it worse. Open carry and stand your ground are perversely lethal laws in the performative name of “safety.”
Civil Service mischiefmayhem
While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.
Damon Linker, on the virtual abolition of merit-based civil service positions in the Federal Government that Trump began shortly before the 2020 Election.
Was Tucker a money-maker?
I can’t help but notice that commentators on Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News can’t agree on whether his show was (1) hugely profitable or whether instead (2) boycotts of his advertisers had “intimidated woke capitalists, who declined to advertise on his show” (Rod Dreher) and thus made it marginal or even a money-loser.
I have no idea which, if either, is true.
I do know that my long Dreher fandom has greatly cooled. I suspect it’s because he and I have both changed during the Trump era: he increasingly supportive of illiberal democracy; I, after flirtation with illiberal democracy, returning uneasily to center-right classical liberalism. “Better the devil you know,” y’know.
Constraints on Single-Payer healthcare
“Health” is an extraordinarily difficult concept to pin down, and if unchecked, it will expand to encompass anything and everything as Leviathan’s vanguard and advance scout.
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A conservative “healthcare system” is one that protects life and prevents disability. Modern medicine is good at resuscitation, reducing the risk of severe yet preventable incidents such as heart attacks and strokes, catching cancers when they can still be treated, and managing chronic illnesses such as asthma and depression. Caring for illnesses both catastrophic and chronic is what a healthcare system is for, and only when there is a strong focus on applying the technical power of medicine to prevent or treat disease, rather than an all-encompassing quest for health, can we speak coherently of a healthcare system worth funding.
As the bobos achieved a sort of stranglehold on the economy, the culture, and even our understanding of what a good life is, no wonder society has begun to array itself against them, with the old three-part class structure breaking apart into a confusing welter of micro-groups competing for status and standing in any way they can. So, for instance, the bobos have abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all. Our politics, meanwhile, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.
[M]ost right-wing institutions that depend on a large customer or donor base have embraced a strategy of monetizing the constant stoking of crisis and paranoia as the new True Faith. If the real-world facts prove inconvenient to the narrative, invent new facts to fit.
And Tucker [Carlson] was the high priest of that faith.
I quit Fox after more than a decade as a contributor when Carlson released a “documentary” for Fox Nation, a streaming service for Fox-addicts who can’t get sufficiently high off the basic cable junk anymore. His Patriot Purge, a farrago of deceptions, fearmongering and “just asking questions” conspiracy theories, was put together to leave the viewer with the distinct impression that the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was some kind of false flag operation or Deep State operation. It was the last straw for me.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade has produced a three results I did not see coming:
First:
The Trump campaign announced this week that it opposes any federal role in regulating abortion and that the issue should be decided by the states. The leaders of the most influential pro-life groups have condemned the announcement. The Susan B. Anthony List stated that “We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard” and called Trump’s position “unacceptable.” Lila Rose of Live Action stated that Trump had “disqualified” himself for the nomination. Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America concurred.
I’m not sure I agree that these three are “the most influential pro-life groups,” but they’re not obscure, either.
I would warm to the idea of a 15-week non-preemptive national ban if the proponents could tell me what provision(s) in the Constitution make abortion an issue for the national government rather than the states. I’ve said and believed for 40 years that reversing Roe would return the abortion issue to the states, because I actually support the 10th Amendment. I contemn emotivist arguments for circumventing it on selected issues.
I no longer read much about the abortion issue, having all the knowledge and principle I need to guide my retired life. But I suspect that these spokesmen (yes, I noticed that they’re women) would cite Sections 1 and 5 of the 14th Amendment as authority:
… nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
If you noticed that invoking Section 1 would imply fetal personhood and thus support an outright national abortion ban, bonus points to you. I suspect the spokesman know that full well.
The theory that this part of section 1 applies to the unborn — as a matter of the intentions of those who wrote and ratified it — has been around for most of the forty years I’ve paid attention to abortion law, and I’ve never quite bought it.
Second, the reversal of Roe sent red states off to the races to enact surprisingly restrictive abortion laws. I always knew that some blue states would declare perpetual open season on the unborn (and they have), but I did not expect red states not even to recognize life-of-the-mother exceptions.
I don’t think this would have happened fifteen years ago, but our polarization is extreme and so are the consequences.
Third, the reversal of Roe has brought sharpness of focus to an important distinction between two kinds of Roe opponents:
The Constitutionalists who considered Roe a judicial usurpation;
The “we must save babies by all possible means” true believers (for lack of a better term).
For better or worse, I’ve mostly theorized my Roe opposition the first way, and that hasn’t changed since Dobbs reshuffled the deck. This probably is a reflection of my legal training and my even longer-standing interest in Constitutional law.
“Mostly” doesn’t mean I don’t support policies and institutions that make childbirth more desirable and feasible than abortion. It also doesn’t mean that I don’t support fairly tight state-enacted restrictions. I do, times two.
For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
It also makes sense to assume that Fox’s behavior will change if it ends up losing this [Dominion] lawsuit. I certainly think it will. Specifically, the people who work there will take care not to put it in writing the next time they quietly conspire to smear someone into oblivion.
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Murdoch’s shop has always followed the herd, a reminder that its core mission was and remains to advocate for its audience’s political priorities, not to provide them with news. Especially when the news happens to contradict those priorities.
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If you happened to tune into Fox [February 2] you found [Tucker] Carlson still at it more than a year later, promising fans that he’s unearthed video that’ll soon prove the government is “lying” about the insurrection.
“The time to decide whether or not you want to kill a deer is before you go hunting.”
“If you don’t want to get a haircut, don’t hang around the barbershop.”
Wisdom via Chris Stirewalt, who preaches a eulogy of sorts for Bill Sammons, late of Fox News, who definitely decided to kill the deer.
Generally
Flipping the script on its head
I ask Oizumi why he is so drawn to this country. “I like to go places where there are people with a real history. In Korea, that same tribe, that same culture has been there for a very long time.” “Well,” I say, “Europe has a long history too.” “No way! That place is frightening.” “Frightening?” “Yes. I went to Italy, Spain, Milan, Florence, and all the buildings were made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. Now, how did they make that? That would take a tremendous amount of energy. In those days there were no bulldozers. Everything was done by hand. A place with that many stone buildings would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that I thought, Wow, Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days.
We are offended only by those who are boorish in the way that working class people are boorish, not by those who are boorish in the way that our powerful classes are boorish.
To the extent that a Disney production manifests the sort of obvious and literal-minded progressive messaging that might outrage some Republican official, it is already failing by the Mouse’s own standards and is destined for obsolescence no matter what. What survives to become fixed in the Disney canon has to feel deeply in tune with its vast and bipartisan audience even when there’s some kind of ideological vision underneath. Politics is welcome in the temple but never nakedly or openly, never crudely — only clothed in the robes of princesses and filtered through the lyrics of Howard Ashman or Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.
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In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.
The author gives a lot of credit to the absence of cell phones and internet connections.
Breaking Covenant
I think the truth is that we have been breaking our covenants with students for quite some time. The rise in student debt is a broken covenant. Adjunctification is a broken covenant. The fact that at some research universities a significant portion of student tuition pays faculty to not teach is a broken covenant. According to this study from Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor at Cal Berkeley, 40 percent of student tuition at his institution goes toward funding departmental research.
Pardon me while I briefly geek out on constitutional legalia.
As a threshold matter, I’m not even certain the Establishment Clause can be incorporated. … Akhil Amar has written … that this federalism provision prevents the federal government from interfering with state established churches. But that ship has probably sailed.
I’m quite certain that the original meaning of the establishment clause was that the federal government could not lawfully interfere with state established churches. Fer cryin’ out loud, people, Massachusetts had an established Congregational Church into the 1830s and nobody thought it was uncontitutional.
Perhaps it also meant that the federal government could not lawfully establish its own national church; that would be nice.
But it never occurred to me that because the Establishment Clause was a federalism provision, it’s illegitimate to use the anti-slavery Civil War Amendments to apply it to the states (the “incorporation doctrine”).
So Indiana could still establish Preacher Boy Billy-Bob’s Landmark Baptist Church as the state religion. That would not be nice.
Politics
Damon Linker: Ron DeSantis Is Not a Fascist
Tens of millions of our fellow citizens don’t like where they think our country is headed, and they’re expressing that dislike at the ballot box. The response to them shouldn’t be you’re not allowed to dislike and attempt to change the country’s direction. The response should be here are reasons why you should be less hostile to recent trends and more fearful that the illiberal reforms you favor will end up making you less free in the long run, too
One of the most impressive things about Barack Obama was that he could make the conservative case more eloquently than 90% of conservatives. One of the most infuriating things about him was he would then do the progressive thing — invariably in the Senate, oftener than not as President.
Damon Linker had replicated that impressive feat with contemporary right-illiberals, like Ron DeSantis. But he remains a liberal (center-left, I’d say). The linked column (and I think the link will get you to it for free) is one of his best and is food for productive thought both for right-illiberals (or those tempted by it) and liberals of both left and right.
The fashy essence of authoritarian populism
[P]er his keynote speech at CPAC on Saturday, it appears the coming campaign will be Trump Unleashed.
My hat is off to whichever speechwriter came up with the line “I am your retribution.” With remarkable efficiency, it divines the fashy essence of authoritarian populism.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
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.
Last October, I began wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM).
My diabetes has never been bad. I’ve never needed insulin. The Family Practitioner who started me on Piaglitazone and Metformin never even uttered the word “diabetes.” He said “I’m going to put you on some meds to control your blood sugar, which is a bit too high.” Soon he dropped the Piaglitazone.
Since my Doc was sort of proactive, I suspect that I never actually made it past “pre-diabetes,” which I think is pretty much the same as “metabolic syndrome.” I’ve known I had metabolic syndrome/pre-diabetes for more than 30 years. And while my doctors (past and present) seemed to consider my A1C of 6.2 pretty good, I looked at it, and at the scale, and eventually said “maybe I put weight on so easily because of what high blood sugar does,” and began thinking that CGM technology might help me control that.
That thought became a reality shortly thereafter when I learned of Levels Health. Through them, I got a Dexcom G6 CGM. This is my personal, subjective report.
First, using a CGM requires some acclimation. Levels didn’t mention that CGM sensors only last about 10 days, and each one measures serum glucose differently. I had to figure that out by looking at the Dexcom app and puzzling over the blank next to “last calibration date.” Yes, you do need to calibrate your CGM sensor unless you want merely to get an idea of the direction your serum glucose is moving twelve times an hour.
Thus, second, the ads for Dexcom that say “no more finger pricks” are exaggerating. You need finger pricks in order to calibrate the new CGM sensor. In my experience, I really need two finger-pricks per sensor: one when glucose is low, another when it’s high. I only calibrated my current sensor at low glucose, and I’m all but positive that it’s exaggerating the rise caused by benign meals that have not been a problem before. Still, two finger-pricks in ten days is much better than what some diabetics experience.
Third, there’s only one good place on my arms to wear a CGM, and if I sleep on that arm with a CGM, it’s apt to disrupt the sensor’s operation. What that means is that my phone is likely to erupt in the dead of night with shrill false alarms (overriding the “off” switch on the phone) of dangerously low blood sugar. Were I frankly diabetic, especially Type I, that no-opt-out alarm might save my life, but for me it’s a definite bug, not a feature.
Fourth, in my experience, the area where I habitually insert the CGM sensor becomes sensitive, giving off stinging sensations and other unpleasant sensations at times.
Fifth, my CGM sensors have intermittent outages where they cease communicating with the app. For that reason, I hesitate to push my luck by swimming or sinking into a hot bathtub, even though that’s supposed to be okay for up to 20 minutes. My hygiene grade is down a bit.
Sixth, it really is interesting, after 30+ years of metabolic syndrome, to watch in more objective terms how a single meal can send my glucose soaring, with all that implies.
Seventh, it worked. I dropped my A1C from 6.2 to 5.7 in four months. I lost a modest amount of weight. Then my new doctor (the old one, younger than me, retired) monkey-wrenched things by saying that he didn’t like diabetics to have A1C that low, for fear of their blood sugar dropping dangerously low. (The likelihood of me ever observing a diet so strictly that I drive my blood sugar too low seems vanishingly low.) I also broke through a weight-loss plateau, though total weight loss with CGM remains modest.
Eighth (and here I pivot), it turns out that controlling serum glucose, for me at least, means eating a low-carbohydrate diet. I know how to do that without a monitor.
Finally, there’s something about CGM that feels to me like biohacking, like quantifying things that really require only generality, like being a control freak. And biohacking seems adjacent to transhumanism, with which I want nothing whatever to do.
So I have told Levels not to ship my next CGM order. I plan to continue a low-carb diet. I plan to do occasional pin-pricks before and after planned binges. If you are pre-diabetic or put weight on too easily, I would recommend giving a look at Levels Health and CGM for a while to get in touch with your very own metabolism.
I haven’t even ruled out returning to CGM during my year-long Levels Health membership. But in a few weeks, I’m done with CGM to give me “metrics” (beyond my weight) on the effects of low-carb eating.
Cultural
Thought fodder
One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs [gender clinics] now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.
Fox news is supposed to be separate from Fox opinion, and the few times I’ve watched the former, that seems broadly true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s perfect mutual understanding and harmony:
On Nov. 9, 2020, host Neil Cavuto cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as she made unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on the air. For this, Fox News Senior VP (and former Trump White House press aide) Raj Shah labeled Cavuto a “brand threat” in a message to top corporate brass.
Hannity and Carlson tried to get Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump tweet about Dominion and noting that there was no evidence of votes being destroyed. “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck?” Carlson texted Ingraham and Hannity on Nov. 12, 2020. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Hannity exploded on top execs, including one who panicked and wrote that Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted” with Fox
On Nov. 19, 2020, after Fox broadcasted the now-infamous Giuliani and Powell press conference about Dominion, then-White House correspondent Kristen Fisher got in trouble for fact-checking their bogus claims. Per the filing, “Fisher received a call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, immediately after in which he emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it, and that Fisher needed to do a better job of, this is a quote, respecting our audience.”
White race hucksters — it’s all about the incentives
if you want a job in DEI – especially an enviable senior position like [Rachel Elizabeth] Seidel [a/k/a Raquel Evita Saraswati] enjoys – being a person of color is explicitly an advantage, as those job listings pretty much universally list coming from a minority background as an advantage in the hiring process. If you create an advantage, people are going to pursue that advantage. Whether or not such a pursuit is ethical is not really relevant to the basic question of incentives and behavior. But like so much else in our contemporary racial conversation, there’s an element of unreality here, as every new Dolezal results in a round of shaking heads and “why would somebody do this?” But it’s obvious why they’re doing it. Progressives created the incentives that are provoking the behavior! This is the world we’ve made.
But the incentives are still unmentionable. As I wrote a couple years ago, we’re in this permanently unsettled position regarding efforts to diversify institutions: all right-thinking people are meant to support such efforts, but if you speak directly about the impact of those efforts – if you acknowledge that programs intended to benefit some minorities in a selection process result in some minorities benefitting in that selection process – then that’s an impermissible microaggression that suggests minorities aren’t deserving. I invite you to go into certain circles of Twitter and say “a lot of Black students get into Ivy League schools because of affirmative action.” You’d be pilloried. But the people pillorying you would all be supporters of affirmative action programs… which exist to get more Black students into Ivy League schools. You must support the intent of the programs but deny their effects. You need to advocate for affirmative action that helps Black and Hispanic students get into elite colleges; you are never to say that some Black and Hispanic students got into college because of affirmative action. But the latter statement forbids expressing precisely the condition endorsed by the former. It’s all deeply bizarre and a product of our permanently-enflamed racial discourse.
With both the Dolezal phenomenon and affirmative action, we’re laboring under an inability to frankly reflect on racial progress and benefits that accrue to being a people of color. The reasons for this are eminently understandable; there’s a fear of taking the focus off of all the work we still have to do to achieve racial equality, and of seeming to suggest that the benefits for people of color I’m talking about are of anything like the same scale or intensity as the challenges they face. They aren’t, of course. But if part of our duty as people opposed to racism is to create social structures that address inequality, some of those structures are going to result in benefits to people of color that could potentially be exploited. The only other alternative is the kind of racial fatalism that’s admittedly quite popular, the belief that we can never create any benefits for people of color at all.
Facebook makes me feel the way I feel when I’m in a hospital.
Political
High admiration for the speech I despised
It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
At those words, spoken by George W. Bush on January 20, 2005 (and penned by the late Michael Gerson), I repudiated my notional membership in the Republican Party. (I call it “notional” because Indiana doesn’t register voters by party, and while I consistently voted Republican primary ballots, I was never a party activist, precinct chairman or such.) I probably also uttered some sort of epithet and commented that Dubya had just declared perpetual war.
I wasn’t wrong, and I don’t regret my independence. But maybe I should have listened attentively to the rest of that second inaugural address:
I remember being startled the moment I heard the words. My ears flinched. I wasn’t sure if I had heard what I thought I had heard. I looked around at the bundled-up men and women shivering on the Mall with me to see if they had heard the same thing I had. They were politely clapping their mittened hands. I thought I caught an undercurrent of murmuring, as if they didn’t know what to make of it.
Some critics called it “messianic” and “extraordinarily ambitious,” and accused Bush of announcing a “crusade.” The conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said the speech “left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike,” because it had “no moral modesty,” no “nuance.” The goal of ending tyranny was “somewhere between dreamy and disturbing,” a case of “mission inebriation.” “This world is not heaven,” she chided.
But, as Gerson later noted, “in the speech, this goal is immediately and carefully qualified.” Bush noted that ending tyranny “is not primarily the task of arms,” that “freedom, by its nature, must be chosen,” and that “when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own.” It was “the concentrated work of generations,” and “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.” Noonan was wrong: Bush was remarkably and explicitly humble and realistic in describing the goal of ending tyranny, which elevated his vision further.
This was no utopian or imperial mission to conquer the world in the name of saving it. It was a statement of principle, sketching an orienting framework within which to understand who we are and what we stand for. Bush was pointing to a polestar, a single fixed point to help guide the ship of state through the storms and winds that would always come.
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The problem with the speech’s legacy is not the presence of moral ambition, which is necessary, but that we failed to take note of the rest of the speech, after the declared goal of ending tyranny. We forget the humility and realism, and we forget that Bush went on to speak of the importance of character, integrity, and family; of community, religion, and service to others with “mercy, and a heart for the weak.” He called on Americans to embrace love for their neighbors and to “abandon all the habits of racism.” Ambition without character does indeed lead to arrogance, moral compromise, and failure, Bush seemed to be saying, even as he warned that character without ambition is too passive in the face of evil.
So now Ron DeSantis is wishy-washy. A bit of a wimp. Or at least runs the risk of looking like one.
That’s a fresh sentiment discernible in some recent assessments, as political analysts and journalists marvel at, chew over and second-guess his failure to return Donald Trump’s increasingly ugly jabs.
I wish I agreed. I’m no DeSantis fan. But where those critics spot possible weakness, I see proven discipline. Brawling with Trump doesn’t flex DeSantis’s muscle. It shows he can be baited. And it just covers them both in mud.
So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
Bacon names and shames federal judges who halted the student loan cancellation policy (Erickson, Grasz, Pittman, and Shepherd), judges in the CFPB funding case (Engelhardt, Willett, and Wilson), and judges in a recent Second Amendment case involving domestic violence restraining orders (Wilson, Ho, and Jones). We should thank Bacon for helping to assemble the next Supreme Court shortlist.
Trump’s lying began with the crowd size of the 2017 inaugural and ended with his denial of the 2020 election results. In between these two events, it was, indeed, literally, morning, noon, and night—without ceasing.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I find transhumanism repugnant, and I believe in the wisdom of repugnance because I believe that some truths are not susceptible of distillation to catchy slogans for the ADHD World we live in, and perhaps not possible to articulate directly at all.
But I was unaware that there was more to it than billionaire nerds asking “wouldn’t it be cool if we could upload our brains and live forever?” No, there’s another case, superficially more plausible:
If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature.
But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming and fire. Such a view forms the basis of antihumanism, a system of thought that removes humans from their pedestal and contends that, given our penchant for destruction—not only of ourselves but also all other species—we are less deserving of existence than are animals, plants, rocks, water, or air. For antihumanists, the only way off the precipice is a fall, with the survivors left to pick up the pieces. And if there are no survivors, that wouldn’t be a tragedy; there will always be beings in the world, even if there are no human beings.
Australian philosopher Toby Ord uses the image of the crumbling ledge in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). “Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves,” Ord writes. He believes that the odds of this happening in the next 100 years are about one in six, the same as in a game of Russian roulette. “Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover,” he concludes.
Ord is not an antihumanist but rather a transhumanist, a research fellow at the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which looks to scientific and technological advances as the only path forward. Transhumanists agree with antihumanists that human nature is morally and physically circumscribed in ways that make it impossible for us to get past the precipice. They likewise agree that Homo sapiens is doomed to disappear. But for transhumanists, this is a wonderful prospect because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling. As Ord writes, “Rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” That something will no longer be “us” in the strictest sense, but our posthuman successors will preserve what is best and most important about us. “I love humanity, not because we are Homo sapiens, but because of our capacity to flourish,” Ord writes.
The appeal of that comes from its familiarity: We’ve been making problems with technology, then solving them with more technology, for a fairly long time now. Unless you stop to think about it, that seems normal.
(H/T Alan Jacobs)
Humanity without limits seems at best inhumane to me. Nonetheless, I recommend the American Scholar article, which pairs well with C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
White nationalism
The constant accusations of “white nationalism” remind me of preachers and other polemicists calling Playboy “hard-core pornography” 50 years or so ago. People are going to catch on fairly quickly when they see something white nationalist/hard-core and there’s no term left on the rhetorical spectrum to describe it.
Haute Couture
I don’t recall ever seeing a piece of haute couture that so vividly captures the intersection of aburdity and misogyny:
Perhaps because of some new movie or something, Justice Brett Kavanaugh seems to be back in the news, and it set me thinking about his confirmation hearings again.
When I was becoming a lawyer, I had to sit for a personal interview with another lawyer (or two). One of the questions was “Have you ever broken the law?” My answer was that, starting around age 19, I had two alcoholic beverages, one on each of two occasions, contrary to law. He/They were amused at my candor.
Back to Justice Kavanaugh: the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness, beginning in high school and continuing, apparently, nonstop to present. I supported him before I knew of this, waffling afterward (I’m a bad member of any tribe).
I expect greater respect for the law from highly-placed Judges. I am obviously not squeaky-clean in the underage drinking department, but I’m close, I admit that I broke the law, and I admit that I was wrong. Kavanaugh lied and tap-danced about his drinking.
“But are you serious that ‘the thing that bothered me most about his nomination was his long history of drinking to drunkenness’? Two women accused him of sexual assaults!”
Yes, I am serious. I was not convinced by those two female accusers. But the history of drinking made both charges more plausible than they would have been without that history. Drunken sexual encounters, voluntary, involuntary and borderline, are the bane of every major university, and both accusations fit fairly well into the “drunken frat boy/drink until you’re irresistible” pattern.
Had I been a Senator, I think I’d have voted to reject the nomination, not because I found those accusations likelier true than not, but because I don’t want an unrepentant, somewhat sanctimonious, drunk on the Supreme Court — a man against whom the accusations had some sting.
Politics
Red-pilling for power
Damon Linker does a pretty good job in The Red-Pill Pusher of explaining and rebutting Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” (Linker’s term, but I doubt Yarvin would reject it), of whom I had heard, and probably could have placed as Right rather than Left figure. Beyond that, I was essentially ignorant of Yarvin’s particular spin on things — or how much influence it has built in formerly-reputable conservative circles like Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy marked him as someone with a background and a mind possibly suited to high office.
Yarvin gets a lot of facts right, a few more plausible. Yet my reaction against his conclusions is different than what Linker articulated (which probably was less than what he could have articulated).
Here’s my problem with Yarvin. He is hungry for power, and his obsession with power has already corrupted him. He has made it clear that among his first exercises of power would be sweeping, radical firings that would cripple government (and cause much misery to the newly-unemployed). Then he and his mostly-unnamed pals would amateurishly assume most or all of the vacated offices and try to impose their will on a country that’s about 50% of a different mind. It would make the Trump years a model of decorum and competence in comparison. I think it highly likely that there would be much bloodshed.
I have no reason to trust that their program would make the country better or make its citizens freer.
No thanks.
Signs of hope
I recently (like within the past half hour as I type) heard a preacher say that he has only seen one encouraging sign in public so far this year: a bunch of NFL players kneeling and praying around a teammate felled on the field by a heart attack.
It’s a tempting narrative: world; hell; handbasket. You can fill in the blanks.
Yet I see other signs — contemporaneous if not distinctly 2023.
I found it encouraging that a high proportion of the worst emerging Republican jackasses were handed their heads by voters last November.
I find it encouraging that honest liberals, and even one Marxist, keep saying things that get them labeled — oh, I don’t know; “white nationalists,” probably. Examples here and here.
I find it almost as encouraging that most honest conservatives have no use for Donald Trump and say to in terms that gives aid and comfort to liberals. (A bold claim I know, but I can always fall back on the No True Scotsman fallacy if you find a counter-example.)
Indeed, I find it encouraging to be reminded that center-left and center-right have an awful lot in common when compared to the alternatives.
The Quaker’s Mule Who Wouldn’t Plow
One of my favorite stories is about the Quaker whose mule refused to plow.
The Quaker tried to coax him every way he knew. Finally, he stepped around in front of the mule, took him gently by the ears, and stared into his eyes.
“Brother mule, thou knowest that I am a Quaker. Thou knowest I cannot beat thee. Thou knowest I cannot curse thee.
“With thou knowest not is is that I can sell thee to the Baptist down the road, and he can beat the living daylights out of thee.” 
Mitch Daniels, though Presbyterian rather than Quaker, ran no negative ads in his two successful runs for governor of Indiana, yet he won re-election in a year when Barack Obama memorably took Indiana’s electors in the presidential race. As President of Purdue (recently retired), he froze tuition for ten years.
It does my soul goodcheers my sinful heart, then, to see that Mitch has supporters who are willing to respond to barbarians who are trying to keep him from running for the Senate seat Mike Braun will vacate next year to run for governor:
Then with a toxic blast of political rectal gas, [Representative Jim] Banks signaled he would enter the brewing 2024 U.S. Senate race. Teaming up with Club for Growth President David McIntosh, the pair did something we’ve never seen before: Running a preemptive TV ad designed to keep a rival — Mitch Daniels — out of the race.
… [I]n the eyes of Club for Growth, a PAC of billionaires, it said in the TV ad, “After 50 years in big government, big pharma and big academia, Mitch Daniels forgot how to fight. An old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”
Long-time GOP operative Mark Lubbers responded to the Club for Growth TV ad, telling me, “These are the same people who cost us Republican control of the Senate. Sad to see that Banks has thrown in with them.”
…
Donald J. Trump Jr. then tweeted on Jan. 13: “The establishment is trying to recruit weak RINO Mitch Daniels to run for U.S. Senate in Indiana. The same Mitch Daniels who agreed with Joe Biden that millions of MAGA Republicans are supposedly a danger to the country & trying to ‘subvert democracy.’ He would be Mitt Romney 2.0.”
This was the first time anyone had described Daniels as a “weak RINO.”
Lubbers responded to Trump the younger: “You think the progressive left needs to be fought; we think it needs to be BEATEN. That requires optimistic positive conservatism that builds majorities, wins elections & makes policy. Not just foaming at the mouth, counting tweets, and grifting contributions. Hit the road.”
When you think politically, … think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next proposed political action hurt Rich Uncle Pennybags? … I am saying that a left-wing movement that devotes most of its time, effort, and attention to actions that fail the test risks no longer being a left-wing movement at all. I’m saying that a left wing that constantly fails the Rich Uncle Pennybags test is precisely the kind of left-wing movement that establishment power would prefer to face – a movement about symbolism over substance, about the individual rather than the masses, about elevating minorities in the ranks of a corrupt system rather than ending that corruption, about personal antipathy rather than structural reality.
…
[P]olitics is about mass action at scale, and the ability of politics properly understood to address interpersonal bigotries is limited. What’s not limited is our ability to reduce economic and social inequalities between identity groups, if we engage in politics in the right spirit and with a healthy understanding of the need to achieve structural change instead of personal critique – the kind of structural change that Rich Uncle Pennybags can’t ignore.
That’s a really good understanding of politics, even if you’re on Uncle Pennybag’s side. But the best parts were (1) examples of pseudo-progressive obsessions that fail the test and may even strengthen Uncle Moneybags, and (2) things I read between the lines.
F’rinstance, Uncle Moneybags doesn’t mind DEI training. It may even help him. He probably doesn’t mind the rich kids of Antifa.
And just as the Right is full of people whose whole purpose in public life seems to be trolling and triggering the Left, so the Left is full of people whose whole purpose in public life, objectively, seems to be trolling and triggering the Right. They fail the Uncle Moneybags test and, along with their equally self-indulgent Right-wing co-conspirators, debase our visible political discourse and waste time that could be spent on consequential, not clickworthy, things.
A Pleasant Surprise
The Justice Department announced Tuesday two Florida residents had been indicted for allegedly vandalizing at least three pro-life pregnancy centers in Florida, spray-painting threats like “if abortions aren’t safe than niether [sic] are you,” “WE’RE COMING for U,” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” on the sides of the buildings. If convicted of the charges—which also included violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—each defendant could face a maximum of 12 years in prison and fines up to $350,000. A number of crisis pregnancy centers around the country faced threats or violent attacks in the months leading up to and following last year’s Dobbs decision.
If forced to wager, I’d have wagered that Biden’s DOJ would never ferret out and prosecute the perpetrators of any attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers. Since I didn’t wager, I’m pleased to have my mild bias disproven.
Nonconformists
Transgender woman with Mike Tyson face tattoo GUILTY of raping two vulnerable mums with “her penis”
Most of the press went along with the defendant’s post-arrest change from man to woman, as did the judge, calling him “she” throughout the trial.” The Sun, god bless ‘em, did not.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
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.
If you think the decline in local newspapers is only an abstract story, or that Facebook posts can make up for local investigations, ladies and gentlemen, we give you New York’s Third Congressional District.
It’s clear to me that my “characteristic role” is “reformer, perfectionist.” I also have a pretty good dose of “investigator, observer.” These tendencies correspond to particular besetting sins, of which I was well aware without the enneagram framework.
Beyond that, I’d feel as uncomfortable getting deeply into enneagrams as I would getting into QAnon. Maybe that’s unfair, but I’m not interested in wading into either enneagrams or QAnon to find out for myself.
David Crosby
If you care about such things, you’re probably aware that David Crosby died Wednesday night at age 81. It’s a gift to the rest of us that he lived so long despite the antics of his younger self.
I have a very soft spot for him, and I can identify three reasons without even breaking a sweat:
The music. He was a great and creative folk-pop artist, and his music generally features great jazz-influenced harmonizations.
The candor. Crosby appeared to be utterly candid about his self-inflicted injuries. Better that he’d not inflicted them in the first place, but afterward he certainly didn’t glamorize them.
The sense of purpose. Marveling that he’d lived so long (see item 2), Crosby felt duty-bound to realize all the good music he had in him in his remaining days.
It’s my understanding that not all will be saved, but that I’m permitted to hope for the salvation of all. Requiescat in pacem; et lux perpetua dona eis domine. I’m not even going to spell-check that.
Why the Machine won’t win
I don’t think that the Machine will win … I don’t think it can. The drive to control is like the old lady who swallowed a fly. The solutions only exacerbate the problem. For the Machine, the problem is contingency: the sheer unpredictability of the world. To kill that fly, it swallowed the spider of hierarchy, the top-down view; but that was not enough. Centuries later, under mechanical influence, we cram down a T-Rex of lies just to convince ourselves that our social world makes sense. It doesn’t.
What do I mean by contingency? The living world is like a tree. Structures and shapes reappear at different scales. Look at a tree and it has pattern, form, wholeness. Look at a single leaf and, though only a tiny part of the tree, it too has pattern, form, wholeness. If your only interest in the tree is firewood, then the wholeness of the leaf doesn’t matter. If, though, you wish to understand a living tree, you get nowhere until you see the wholeness of the leaf. This is the source of contingency. What happens at leaf-level is almost infinitely variable, but reverberates up all the scales to the biggest. And this is the Machine’s great weakness. If its eyes were allowed to see the fractal subtlety of the leaf, then its mind could not devise a system for controlling the tree. It would be lost in contemplation. So it abstracts out the life. Leaves becomes Lego pieces and people become numbers. Rather than measure the world, the Machine always measures a proxy. This is how it will fail.
How do I know this? The Machine itself is an organism, although it does not know it, and organisms die.
…
It doesn’t matter whether you tear your empire to pieces in a frenzy of revolutions or allow it to slowly collapse under its own bureaucratic weight. Either way, it dies. It would be better to learn acceptance. The end of a civilisation is not the end of the world. It is not even the end of the human world. It is merely the end of the the culture of the cities: a passing phase that encloses even the most remote countryside now, but which is not all we have been or can be.
I don’t know that I’ve coined many phrases in my life, but I claim credit (after watching hired-gun “forensic witnesses”) for labeling the proverbial “world’s oldest profession” as “forensic dating.”
In that sense, our former President has long kept a stable of forensic lawyers — hired guns ready to file any damnfool nonsense to punish his critics.
But every lawyer is ethically obliged not knowingly to file lawsuits based on false facts or lacking any plausible legal theory in support. In other words, many of Trump’s lawsuits were unethical. But he and his lawyers never (or virtually never) got called on it. In my experience, a high proportion of lawsuits are unethical and should get sanctioned, but Trump is not alone; Judges tend be pretty lax on idiotic lawsuits from people who don’t pretend to be billionaires, too.
I was once a defendant in one of those idiotic lawsuits. The facts were roughly thus: Zoning ordinances forbade sexually-oriented businesses within X feet of residential neighborhoods (I think). Anyhow, someone set up a porn shop <X feet from whatever it was. I signed a petition asking My Fair City to enforce the zoning law.
So the city sued me, and everyone else who signed the petition, and the filthmonger, saying essentially “we don’t know what the ordinance requires us to do; let the people who annoy us fight it out with the filthmongers.”
I knew the odds were against sanctions, so I just fought my way out of the suit and then glared even more than usual at the corrupt City Attorney who filed it.
So nobody could be happier than I that a judge has finally called Trump’s lawyers on an unethical lawsuit, and imposed big-dollar sanctions ($900,000+) on his lawyer and on him personally for a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton (every silver lining must have a cloud) and others:
“This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in a 46-page ruling. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”
…
“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Judge Middlebrooks wrote. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions.”
…
Mr. Trump’s claims were “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion,” the judge wrote, adding, “This is a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts.”
“NHL player Ivan Provorov shouldn’t have to wear a pride jersey for the same reason Colin Kaepernick shouldn’t have to stand for the anthem. … [T]he universal principle is free expression over compelled speech,” – Nicholas Grossman via Andrew Sullivan.
Complicating Grossman’s attractive categorical statement is that this is the NHL, not the government. But I like free speech culture, not just free speech law.
Politics
Manichean fanaticism, left and right
The right is not unique in conspiratorial delusion, of course. The refusal of many on the left to accept Tump’s legitimate victory in 2016 was real and widespread. Both Hillary Clinton and John Lewis declared Trump an illegitimate president. Remember the Diebold machines of 2004? Not far from the Dominion stuff today. And the intensity of the belief on the left in an unfalsifiable “white supremacist” America has a pseudo-religious fervor to it. The refusal of [Eric] Metaxas to allow any Republican to remain neutral or skeptical is mirrored by Ibram X. Kendi’s Manichean fanaticism on the far left.
But the long-established network of evangelical churches and pastors, and the unique power of an actual religion to overwhelm reason, gives the right an edge when it comes to total suspension of disbelief.
The Economist is generally sane and smart. But that block-quote amounts, doesn’t it, to “the far right engages whatever cause progressives have thrust onto center stage”?
Reichsbürger, a German far-right extremist group that rejects the legitimacy of the federal republic in favour of the German Reich of 1871. Read the full story here.
Friendshoring, a kind of reverse offshoring in which supply chains are redirected to stable, ideally allied countries. Read the full story.
Economists’ Words of the Year:
…
Aridification: the long-term drying of a region; a term applied when “drought,” or even “megadrought,” are no longer sufficient.
…
Productivity paranoia: an affliction of home workers afraid of being seen as shirkers, and bosses afraid that home-workers are indeed shirking.
TWaT city: one where many commuters travel to the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Battery belt: a green-friendly revitalised form of America’s “Rust Belt” through investment in industries such as electric-car manufacturing and “gigafactories” that make batteries for electric cars.
Vertiport: where multirotor drones that are large enough to carry people, also known as flying cars, take off and land.
At war with decadent dictionaries
I will never relent! “Literally” means literally, not “virtually” or “damn straight!” If we let them get away with changing that meaning, 55 years of my life are in vain!
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
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.
Few areas of medicine have become as politically heated, and in need of cool-headed research, as treatment of transgender children. Neither side seems to be engaging in good faith. Some Democrats have misrepresented the medical consensus on how best to help children with gender-related distress, presenting this as a closed matter when there is no global scientific consensus. The cherry-picking of evidence by medical bodies such as the American Academy of Paediatrics helps explain why Republicans have become twice as likely as Democrats to believe scientists have agendas beyond the pursuit of scientific fact.
More drugs and surgery for kids: The American Academy of Pediatrics this week came out with new recommendations: Obese children should be given weight loss drugs and surgery at ages as young as 12 and 13, respectively. Now, that is probably the right thing to do for severely obese children. But also: The new recommendations argue that “obesity is a chronic disease.” Obesity, in the new mindset, can never be about choices. It is not a lifestyle problem.
The message is: body positivity and junk foodare a-ok (can’t be shaming anyone!) until the American medical establishment can profit, and then it’s a sharp pivot to hardcore drugs and surgery. It’s cheap, government-subsidized corn products shoveled into school lunches, then a series of expensive drugs for chemically imbalanced adolescents. There is no middle ground.
One thing I noticed in the new pediatric guideline is they use the word overweight in a way I’d never seen. It goes: “youth with overweight and obesity.” As in: “This is the AAP’s first clinical practice guideline (CPG) outlining evidence-based evaluation and treatment of children and adolescents with overweight and obesity.” Obesity and “overweight” is a disease you catch.
Has anyone devised and deployed an effective incentive for doctors to learn about, and prescribe, good nutrition — patient-tailored if necessary?
Legalia
Notably off-narraative
Some LGBetc students sued to circumvent or invalidate exemptions for certain religious schools from certain nondiscrimination rules:
To recap, a coalition of students sued the Biden Department of Education, seeking to roll back religious liberty and place a high price on the autonomy of religious organizations, the Biden administration defended religious liberty, and a Clinton-appointed judge dismissed the case, relying in part on unanimous Supreme Court precedent decided by both Republican and Democratic-appointed justices.
This is not exactly the culture war narrative you hear on cable news.
David French, trying to inject a little anti-inflammatory into the culture war narrative.
(H/T Get Religion, critiquing the pathetic coverage of the story by RNS).
Covenants not to compete
For the record, I viscerally and strongly support the Biden FTC’s move to abolish Covenants Not to Compete. I do so because I have seen their abuse over and over again.
My state, Indiana, always greets lawsuits over these covenants with ritual incantations that they are viewed with disfavor. Then it always upholds them, no matter how ludicrous and unreasonable.
What I most hate about the Indiana approach is the perversity of this reasoning:
Unless otherwise agreed, all employees are “at will.”
It’s sad that you uprooted your family and moved X miles for a job with an employer who didn’t mention covenants not to compete, but when your new employer thrust the covenant before you on your first day and said “sign,” it was supported by adequate consideration because employer didn’t fire you then and there.
Yes, the employer could still fire you without cause tomorrow. What is it about “at will” you don’t understand, dummy?
I suppose if you checked, you might find one or two covenants rejected by an Indiana appellate court, though I don’t recall one. So sue me.
And I suppose that the FTC probably lacks lawful power to abolish them. So sue it. I know someone will.
Politics
The difference between conservatives and Freedom Caucus
Some people have asked me, “How has the Trump era changed you?” For one thing, it has made me a lot more conservative — not in the Fox-and-talk sense, but in an older, Burkean one. Most of the radicalism in me has been snuffed out.
One of the GOP’s new congressmen, Madison Cawthorn, said, “I want a new generation of Americans to be radicals.”
The populism that the press keeps styling as some sort of conservatism is still radical two year later, as shown by legislation that proposes wholesale to tear down systems and replace them with untried “conservative” alternatives. Florida Governor DeSantis is not exempt from this observation, as he loads up the Board of New College of Florida with populists like Christopher Rufo, who are in a hurry to demolish and rebuild.
One Simpson’s episode worth ten thousand words
As we approach the 30th anniversary of The Simpsons’ legendary Monorail episode, Alan Siegel caught up with Conan O’Brien—a former writer for the show—on what it was like to pitch what is now considered one of the most timeless bits in sitcom history. “[“Marge vs. the Monorail”] warned the world about charismatic men selling foolishly grandiose solutions to problems that don’t need fixing,” Siegel writes for The Ringer. “References to the episode will never cease making O’Brien happy. While browsing the Rose Bowl flea market, his friend once noticed a framed travel poster showcasing Homer and the monorail. ‘It says, “Glides as smoothly as a cloud,’’’ O’Brien says. ‘I was like, “You have to buy that for me.” It wasn’t even that much. That’s hanging in my house, and I kind of smile every time I see it.’ Still, the fact that ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ is seemingly brought up whenever a grifter dupes the public surprises O’Brien. After all, it was an idea that started very, very small.”
[A]ttempts to ban ordinary weapons such as semiautomatic rifles and handguns are plainly unconstitutional, that they would be unlikely to do much to deter violent crime, and that they are at root intellectually dishonest: They are more genuinely a culture-war assault by progressive-leaning urbanites and suburbanites on gun owners as a demographic, one that is perceived (not entirely accurately) as being socially retrograde, white, male, rural, Southern, middle-aged—everything that communicates “Trump voter” to people living in Greenwich, Connecticut.
[I]t’s long past time for well-meaning conservatives writing in good faith to face up to the facts: The GOP is not an economically populist party and shows no signs at all of becoming one. It’s a culturally populist party with a plutocratic economic agenda.
“The only reason for a Republican hopeful to put their own aspirations aside and back DeSantis in 2024 is because it would be good for the country for the GOP to finally rid itself of Trump,” Nick writes in Tuesday’s Boiling Frogs. “I doubt a single one will pass on the race for that reason.”
The Stanford historian David M. Kennedy has spent a career as an authority on American society and politics; winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote one of the most popular textbooks on American history and has delved into a number of controversies and political movements. But he has struggled to come up with any analogue from the past for what he describes as the “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “This is a unique moment,” he says, “where a degree of insanity and irrationality has infected a large enough sector of our body politic that we’re really sick. I think we are politically sick, and I use that word advisedly.”
The Federal Election Commission decided last week to dismiss a complaint brought by the Republican National Committee and other GOP campaign groups that alleged Gmail’s spam filter constituted “illegal, corporate in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign and Democrat[ic] candidates across the country.” Republicans cited a North Carolina State University study that found GOP campaign emails were sent to spam at a significantly higher rate than Democratic ones, but FEC officials found no evidence any disproportionate results were intentional and held that Google had “credibly supported its claim” that the spam filter exists for commercial purposes. As Sarah noted last year, Republican campaigns have a long history of overusing and sharing email lists, resulting in spam filters being triggered at a higher rate.
I doubtless suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, even after having watched with bemusement people with Bush or Obama derangements. By admitting this, I’m saying that I simply have never understood how Donald J. Trump could appeal to any upright adult human, let alone appeal as POTUS.
I know he does appeal to some such people, though, and is at least tolerable to many more. So I need periodically to let one of his defenders make the case:
When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like with the audio debate a few years ago “Do you hear ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’?,” what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests.
(Another thing I can’t understand is how vocal NeverTrumper George Conway and Kellyanne kept their marriage intact 2015-2020.)
Cited without any conviction that it really matters
Renato Mariatti makes the case that Biden’s retention of classified documents is nothing like Trump’s:
…
Based on what we know now, Biden’s sloppy retention of a smattering of classified documents looks more like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inadvertent retention of classified material on a private email server than former President Donald Trump’s stubborn refusal to return hundreds of classified documents to the DOJ despite repeated demands from federal officials.
Trump is under investigation for willful retention of classified records because he ignored direct requests from national archives officials, a grand jury subpoena and even a personal visit from DOJ’s top counterintelligence official. The FBI seized the documents pursuant to a search warrant only after they discovered that Trump’s attorneys lied to them and that documents had been moved inside Mar-a-Lago after their visit.
…
While the Biden investigation is at an early stage, and there may be key facts that are not yet public, Biden’s actions appear to have been sloppy and inadvertent rather than willful and obstructive. Most of the statutes that Trump is under investigation for violating wouldn’t apply to Biden’s conduct. The only statute that Hur would likely investigate is 18 U.S.C. 793(f)(1), which punishes the loss or removal of national defense information resulting from “gross negligence.”
Culture
Woke schoolmarms
[W]hy does wokeness … drive me crazy?
The beginning of an answer can be found in the fact that wokeness makes me feel like I’m attending Sunday school in a denomination and parish I never chose to join. I just turn on the radio or open the paper or scroll through Twitter — and the next thing I know, a finger-wagging do-gooder with institutional power behind him is delivering a sermon, showing me The Way, calling on me to repent, encouraging me to be born again in the moral light.
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
Walter M. Miller Jr. [A Canticle for Leibowitz]()
Faces and heels
Aaron Renn has a fascinating account of “heels” and “faces,” a dichotomy from the argot of professional wrestling that I’d not heard before, including this interesting take on the Trump phenomenon:
Playing the heel is not always a strategic failure. Some people can succeed in both using heel mode to benefit themselves, and having some strategic success as well.
The big example is Donald Trump. The party system, political finance structure, and media apparatus made it essentially impossible for any fundamental changes to or questioning of the system to gain traction. Trump, in a judo type move, was able to use the media’s desire for a conservative heel to draw immense media attention that catapulted him to the presidency. Most of the time, he was able to successfully parry media attacks using some variation of heel tactics.
Not only that, his candidacy and presidency shook up the system in a way that I don’t recall ever happening since the Reagan era. While ultimately it might be completely suppressed – every major institution in society, including the Republican Party establishment, is aligned with making that suppression happen – he certainly made an impact. And that would not have happened without using heel tactics.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump has not only spent decades in the media spotlight, he’s also in the pro wrestling hall of fame. He has a deep understanding of how these dynamics work and how to deploy them successfully.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
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.
Beware, lest the fate of Jordan Peterson befall thee
Now, no one who has followed [Jordan] Peterson—presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario—seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know.
The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood.
…
[T]here is something about the [Jordan] Peterson story that is more chilling. It was not enough for the College to declare his comments offensive. It had to go one step further and imply that there was something about him that was unwell. By referring Peterson to a therapist for daring to speak his mind, the College of Psychologists of Ontario has pathologized dissent. It has made political disagreement into an illness.
Stanford University has, mercifully, retreated from some seriously deranged and intellectually incoherent rules:
To mention but a single category of forbidden words, Stanford’s thirteen-page index prohibits terms that define people by just one of their characteristics. “Prisoner,” for example, defines people by the characteristic of being, or having been, in prison. Instead, Stanford says, one should say “person who is/was incarcerated.” My first, uncharitable thought was that Stanford’s DEI experts hadn’t gone nearly far enough, for as you will see if you think deeply about it, the expression “person who is/was incarcerated” still identifies people according to just one of their characteristics, the characteristic of being incarcerated.
…
Another of the banned words on Stanford’s list is “prostitute.” Anyone can see why. Who wants to be called a prostitute? The Stanford DEI administrators suggest substituting the phrase “person who engages in sex work,” which is considerate of them. After thinking it over, however, I thought “Oho! Does not this phrase too define people according to just one of their characteristics, the characteristic of engaging in sex work?” Perhaps one might say “person who may, sometimes, perform sexual acts for money, as anyone might from time to time.” But who is to say what counts as a sexual act these days? So that’s out. This is a tough one. For now, the best substitute for “prostitute” I’ve been able to come up with is “political consultant.”
One of my most vital convictions is summed up in this post: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” Americans have these wildly distorted views of people whom they perceive to be their political enemies because so many journalists and talking heads enrich themselves through stoking hatred. Those people should be utterly shunned.
I’m confident this originated with Alan Jacobs, though I don’t have a URL.
This admonition hasn’t been far from my mind since I first saw it. But I would refine it: “Does this writer, in this blog or publication, make bank when we hate one another?” I have to have that refinement or else Rod Dreher’s Chicken Little routine at The American Conservative would disqualify him even though his Substack, Rod Dreher’s Diary, is just fine — so intense that I want to avert my eyes sometimes, but not making bank on hate.
For Rod’s sake, I wish he’d find a way to dump his Chicken Little gig.
Populists, too, can march
Ron DeSantis has appointed a bunch of conservatives, even a rabble-rouser or two, to the Board of New College of Florida, the most liberal (in the political sense — i.e., “progressive”) of Florida’s state schools.
Michelle Goldberg refers to it as Christopher Rufo’s “long march through the institutions,” which strikes me as just about perfect, if you know the allusion.
The end of woke capital?
Is the politically active CEO poised to become a thing of the past? “Businesses waded into these once-taboo topics to begin with because they claimed they aligned with their corporate values, and—let’s be real—because they viewed it as good PR,” Beth Kowitt writes for Bloomberg. “[But] the era of widespread corporate outspokenness is ending. Part of the calculus for corporations is that they may be realizing they overestimated the goodwill their public stances generate. Research from Vanessa Burbano, a professor at Columbia Business School, has found that there is a ‘significant demotivating effect’ if an employer takes a stance an employee disagrees with, but no statistically motivating effect if the employee agrees. ‘The blowback you get is greater than the benefit,’ she told me. The reason, she says, is likely what’s called a ‘false consensus effect.’ People tend to assume that others share their values and are surprised and react more strongly when they find out that’s not the case.”
I don’t know about the wider trends, but woke capital is still trying to tell Indiana’s legislature what to do. Maybe they’re doing that because they succeeded with Indiana RFRA in 2005 and there’s no reason to think they can’t succeed again, so highly do we value our image as business magnet.
Social Climbing
It’s not the sort of thing I’d usually read, but for some reason, this caught my eye: Xochitl Gonzalez, The New Case for Social Climbing. Recommended.
Ethnomasochism
The passing of the Queen became primarily an occasion for a recitation of the crimes of British imperialism, both real and imagined. This catechism, and those that follow the same template in other Western countries, ironically serves to provide a kind of cohesion — not of the nation, but of a post-national ruling class that regards itself as the civilized minority and defines itself against a backward majority.
Matthew B. Crawford, Love of one’s own. I just discovered that Crawford has a Substack. I’m in!
Uniqueness
It must surely be granted that whatever is unique defies definition. Definition then must depend on some kind of analogical relationship of a thing with other things, and this can mean only that definition is ultimately circular.
The committee’s report documents starkly how Trump literally erased and stopped history from being recorded as he waited to see how the storming of the Capitol would unfold: He stopped the White House photographer from taking pictures between 1:30 and 4 pm, there are no official records—as there should be—of his telephone calls that afternoon despite his assistant saying “he was placing lots of calls,” and, “the President’s official Daily Diary contains no information for this afternoon between the hours of 1:19 pm and 4:03 pm, at the height of the worst attack on the seat of the United States Congress in over two centuries.” These are huge historical holes, as anyone who studies the presidency knows—the daily diary usually tracks every single interaction a president has to the minute, including who stepped into or out of what room when, when telephone calls were attempted, whether they were successful, etc. And we have these records from the darkest and most fraught moments of American history—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Saturday Night Massacre, 9/11, and so on. Trump’s foresight to stop these records on January 6 is as solid evidence of a mens rea, a guilty mind, as you could imagine.
I got an email from a Florida Man today, saying the January 6 report is all LIES! LIES! LIES! and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, stupid people, send money to this grift I call a defense fund!
Those who haven’t figured out that this is a grift, funnelling money straight into his pocket, deserve to lose whatever they send.
Mitch McConnell ain’t afraid of Florida Man
In another sign that Republicans are really ready to ditch Trump, Mitch McConnell was brutal on the former president in a recent interview with NBC News: “Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished.” And then on losing the midterms: “We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party—largely made by the former president—that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos.” Nasty and trending toward chaos is a pretty perfect way to describe the former president and his would-be political successors.
If the House was full of Dan Crenshaws, Mike Gallaghers, Steve Scalises, and Pete Meijers and purged of all the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes, it would be just as ideologically conservative if not more so, but it would be a lot less amateurish and crazy. And that would be good for the GOP, conservatism, and the country—because voters don’t just vote for individual candidates, they vote for which party they want to see in power. So of course, all things being equal, the “establishment” should err on the side of supporting candidates who make the party more attractive to voters generally.
[A]llies and rival powers alike know that a Republican winning the White House could portend foreign policy reversals on multiple fronts around the globe. That makes us a far less reliable partner and source of stability than we have been in the past.
Social media carrying water for the Administration
Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
…
These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.
Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
This story is significant because private actors can violate first amendment free speech rights if they are acting under government coercion to do so — as they apparently have been.
I have taken all recommended Covid vaccines and available boosters. I know that “do your own research” can easily lead one to quacks and deliberate liars, and a realistic assessment of my science literacy suggests I’d be susceptible to that. I don’t object to the government communicating its official position to citizens. But I draw the line at government censoring dissent — directly or by turning social media into its agents.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
“The Campaign to Re-Educate Jordan Peterson” reminds me of how little written about Peterson. That isn’t likely to change because I just can’t take the time to get more than a smattering of the Jordan Peterson content available, and I don’t want to write in ignorance.
I like what I’ve heard and read and seen, but I was making my bed before Jordan Peterson was out of diapers, and I don’t personally need his coaching on how to do life. If a lot of younger (mostly-)men find it beneficial, I’m sure they could do far worse than taking advice from him.
In recognition of his influence, though, I pray for him daily.
AI’s limits
I have been an AI skeptic, which extended to Chat GPT. Ezra Klein has a fantastic podcast on the topic, which I haven’t even finished yet.
My fundamental instinct was right: AI is closely akin to bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense that it bears no relationship to truth. What AI does — so far at least if not ever and always — is basically pastiche of things that it has read and stored in its memory banks.
But my skepticism overlooked the harm AI can do. To make a long story short, I don’t think I can ever trust the internet again for important research; it’s too easy for a single AI “clickfarms” to create a web of websites all pointing in the wrong direction, or pointing aimlessly, with alluring headlines and reciprocal hyperlinks to reinforce the bullshit.
And of course our enemies will be using AI in elections to make any Russian interference in the 2016 election negligible in comparison.
Conservatism and Woke Capital
When I see stories about how Indiana’s conservatism makes it hard to recruit and retain tech workers, I detect a PR campaign at work.
Big Business has been a solvent dissolving families and communities for at least a century, and the press increasingly is a lazy accomplice.
Launch credentials
Aaron Renn has moved to Substack, and The Masculinist is no more. I’m not shedding many tears over that, but I endorse this from #48:
I have a three-year-old, and my ambition for him is that he will not have to go to college. I hope that by the time he turns 18, there will be alternative paths for him to launch himself into life without having to spend the time and money that were previously expended to obtain these “launch” credentials.
Let’s be honest, for 95% of people, college is purely about vocational credentialing. They go to college so they can get a good job coming out of it. For most high paying positions today, a college degree is still the price of entry. In some professions, the amount of formal education required to practice is still going up.
But in others it’s changing in the opposite direction. And that change is a good thing, though we need a lot more of it.
Nellie Bowles excerpts
Red-letter day
I almost never agree with Josh Hawley since he re-invented himself as a populist pugilist, but he hit a right note here:
Standing with me is Josh Hawley, who this month encouraged young men to “log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date.”
Nellie Bowles, TGIF. All subsequent Nellie Bowles excerpts from the same January 6 post.
Enforcing a dubious orthodoxy
A new law in California paves the way for doctors to lose their license for “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.” That sort of behavior is now considered “unprofessional conduct.”
Longtime TGIF readers know my stance, but for all the newcomers: Misinformation and disinformation are real phenomena. But most of the time these days the words are political terms applied to any information a ruling clique doesn’t like. Often, it’s used by progressive journalists who want to see various voices censored on social media.
In the case of Covid, many, many very real facts were considered mis-and-disinfo. Like: The vaccine does not prevent transmission of Covid. That was considered fake news, verboten. Had this law been in place you would have lost your medical license for saying it. In that case, people saw with their own bodies that, although vaccinated, they were very much coughing. But thanks to this new law that muffles doctors, who knows what we won’t know going forward.
Pretendians
Another fantastically insane fake Native American: I’m beginning to think that any high profile Native American influencer should be assumed to be a white girl with a spray tan. The latest Pretendian, who is quite literally a white girl with a spray tan: Kay LeClaire. A major leader in the Indigenous movement, LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. She was a co-owner of giige, a “Queer and Native American-owned tattoo shop and artist collective in Madison, WI.” She was a community leader-in-Residence at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and was part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force. She has had copious speaking engagements, and she even led a name-change-mob, forcing the local music venue Winnebego to change its name for Indigenous sensitivity (it was named after its street). She sold crafts and clothes, all while pretending to be a Native American (that’s a federal crime, by the way). Obviously she also claims to be Two-Spirit, a sort of nonbinary identification long-practiced in Native cultures.
She is in fact German, Swedish and French Canadian. An anonymous blogger identified the fraud.
On a related note, it’s a good time to read this article about how the official “Native American” population in the U.S. between the years 2010 and 2020 . . . doubled. Pretty soon every high school senior will be Native American. Little Harrison and Haisley will be touring the Princeton campus like, “why, yes, this is my ancestral feathered headdress, thanks for asking.”
Governors putting immigrants on buses to NYC
Wait . . . now Democrats are busing migrants to New York? Gov. Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, is busing migrants to New York City. And New York mayor Eric Adams is not happy about it, saying: “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation.”
Recall not three months ago, when busing migrants to New York was considered outrageous, potentially human trafficking, worthy of huge splashy headlines and endless features about the suffering these trips were causing. When the buses come from Colorado, surely the response will be the same? Of course not.
I just checked, and there is not a single story on The New York Times homepage right now. Polis describes his busing program to NYC versus the essentially identical Republican busing program to NYC as “night and day.” Because, Polis says: “We are respecting the agency and the desires of migrants who are passing through Colorado. We want to help them reach their final destination, wherever that is.”
In 1992 [David Letterman] was famously passed over to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show” in favor of Jay Leno. Months passed, Mr. Leno’s ratings wobbled, NBC offered Mr. Letterman a second chance. And even though he was now fielding better offers from other networks and syndicators, he still had to have Carson—it was his dream from childhood to succeed that brilliant performer, have that show. He couldn’t give it up.
His advisers, in the crunch, told him a truth that is said to have released him from his idée fixe. There is no Johnny Carson show anymore, they said, it’s gone. It’s the Jay Leno show now, and you never wanted to inherit that.
Soon after, Mr. Letterman accepted the CBS show where he finally became what he wanted to be, No. 1 in late night.
Sometimes you have to realize a dream is a fixation, its object no longer achievable because it doesn’t exist.
…
Some of the [House Speaker election] spectacle connects in my mind to the fact that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a longtime idea that he must be speaker, and would do anything for it, and left his colleagues thinking eh, he just wants to be speaker—he’s two-faced, believes in little, blows with the wind. So they enjoyed torturing him. And in the end he made the kind of concessions that make a speakership hardly worth having.
This introduced an unusually white-hot Peggy Noonan column, and her no-holds barred take-down of the Freedom Caucus (“stupid,” “highly emotional,” “nihilis[ts],” no “historical depth”) is spot-on.
Remembering January 6
At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”
We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.
… The House inquiry into Hunter Biden damages him but not his father ….
One of Karl Rove’s predictions for 2023. I have no opinion on most of them, but this one’s spot on, and the obsession of the GOP Congress-in-Waiting (there is no Congress until a Speaker is elected, which hasn’t happened as I write) is contemptible.
Speaker Pelosi
I know Nancy Pelosi was (is?) almost as hated by Republicans as Hillary Clinton. In reaction, I was inclined to praise her effectiveness as Speaker of the House.
But I must admit that her effectiveness was purchased at the cost if further infantilizing our feckless Congress. Pelosi was effective at advancing Democratic goals not purely by management and persuasion. She tended to formulate massive omnibus bills in secret and then introduce them at the last minute before something dreadful like a government shutdown would arrive. Last year’s $1.7 trillion year-end bill was a classic example.
Her sobriquet probably should be “Take It or Leave It Nancy.”
To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
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.
Then there’s the fortifying fact that Congress passed greatly needed reforms of the Electoral Count Act as part of the omnibus bill that currently awaits Biden’s signature. Those changes clarify the procedures Congress and the Vice President must follow in the event that a future president and/or state legislatures attempt to overturn the will of the voters in the way that President Trump encouraged them to do as part of his self-coup attempt in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.
We knew for 2 years that reforming that poorly-written law was extremely important. Was paying a $1.7 trillion boondoggle-enriched ransom the only way to get it done?
Seeing what we expect to see
Since what we select to attend to is guided by our expectations of what it is we are going to see, there is a circularity involved which means we experience more and more only what we already know.
The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer stops doom-scrolling Twitter and locking his eyes on cable news, and now sees some hopeful signs:
Back in March, Francis Fukuyama, a prophet of optimism, suggested that Ukraine’s example of resistance might help spiritually rally liberal democracies to defend themselves against internal threats. He called it a revival of the “spirit of 1989.”
That prediction, which I doubted when he issued it, has come to pass. Even if I can’t prove that the causation tracks with Fukuyama’s argument, the results are palpable. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Western democracies have voted to cast aside populist goons. Emmanuel Macron held off Marine Le Pen. In October, Brazilians disposed of Jair Bolsonaro. In the midterm elections, the United States roundly repudiated election-denying Republicans, evidence of Donald Trump’s waning influence.
I’ve been interested in this sort of thing for maybe 55 years. In law school, I got the top grade, in a class of 100-or-so, on Introductory Constitutional Law.
Yet I still found Ken’s post illuminating and a wonderful distillation of why “the first amendment isn’t absolute” is analytically useless. I hope it’s one of his Substack posts that you can read in full even if you’re not a subscriber.
A reliable contrarian
I have affirmation from a pretty good source that Bari Weiss’s Substack publication, recently rebranded as The Free Press, is a reliable way to get news that mainstream press aren’t covering, such as the poor science behind government Covid policy (or science that even contradicts it), problems in the world of gender transitioning, and such.
Yeah, you can get contrarian stuff lots of other places, but is it journalism or is it lazy-ass opinionating? Bari has a business plan and some actual, serious journalists writing for her, and that’s consistent with her plan to be a real journal with real news.
Election2026 and Election2028
I can’t believe I’ve already created tags Election2026 and Election2028 for my Obsidian database!
Here’s what prompted it:
Republicans face a favorable Senate map in 2024, when Democrats will defend seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. Neither party appears to have any comparably strong pickup opportunities in 2026 or 2028, so the odds favor a Republican majority in each of the three Congresses starting in 2025.
The source, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, was analyzing the partisan merits of a call in Vox for SCOTUS Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to retire now so Joe Biden can fill their seats: “Sotomayor and Kagan are only in their 60s, but the actuaries at Vox say it’s time for them to go” the subheadline summarizes.
I will be surprised if either of the Justices heeds the call, and I’ll be particularly disappointed if Kagan does, since she has an especially powerful combination of intelligence and personability that reportedly moderates the tendencies of her conservative colleagues.
(Sigh!) George Santos
Is there anything worse than worrying about future elections? Probably.
I tried to avoid even reading beneath the surface of the George Santos story, but it is such a parable that I finally relented:
At this point you might be thinking, “Are we sure he’s even gay?” A man willing to lie about anything and everything to spruce up his political appeal might reasonably conclude that identifying as gay is more of an asset than a liability in a state like New York, especially for a party that’s keen to be seen as more diverse. As chance would have it, it turns out that George Santos was married to a woman as recently as 2019 …
Trump proved that the modern right is willing to vest power in someone who’s comprehensively obnoxious. The defense of Santos is apt to prove that the right is willing to vest power in a total cipher. Who he really is, what’s true and what’s false, may be unclear even to him at this point. He’s barely discernible as a persona, just a series of lies stitched together. And so he’s a test case in how little character matters so long as one mouths the right talking points about being a fighter rather than a sucker. Can sheer pugnacity excuse anything? Will hardcore partisan right-wingers shill for a grotesque Tom-Ripley-style scam artist just to spite the left, because his seat is important and because he confounds Democrats’ expectations of identity politics?
I’m thinking yes.
…
I hope the House expels him anyway …
But they won’t do it. And if they don’t, I won’t complain. So much of this party’s elected leadership since 2015 has stooped to pretending to be things they’re not in order to gain power that it seems unjust to hold George Santos singularly culpable. By what right do reptiles like McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, who traded traditional Republicanism for Trumpism because that’s what it took to get ahead, sit in judgment of Santos for constructing his own identity to move up in the world? They’re all grifters. They deserve each other.
The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing. This is not a malicious conspiracy by evil authorities so much as a neurotic defense mechanism in the face of the disturbing reality that the comforts and conveniences of recent decades may be drawing to a close.
To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 