Category: Legalia

Friday, January 10, 2025

Trump 47

I’m leading with Trump because his coronation is imminent and I’ve encountered a few unfamiliar worthy “takes” on him.

The Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election. These are not merely matters that might be disputed, or on which reasonable people can disagree, or of which citizens in the public square can claim ignorance. They are lies, big, consequential lies that strike at the heart of the American system of government, that deny the history through which we have all lived, that reject the unambiguous facts that are in front of our noses. They are lies that require exceptional brazenness, or exceptional cowardice, or a break with reality to assert.

…

Whatever the defenses they come up with, however, the senior appointees of the Trump administration will have to enter public service having affirmed an ugly lie, or several. No matter what other qualities they have to their credit, that will remain with them. That, in turns, means that we can never really trust them: We must always suppose that, having told an egregious lie to get their positions, they will be willing to tell others to hold on to them. They can have no presumption of truthfulness in their government service.

That in turn will change them fundamentally. In Robert Bolt’s marvelous A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains to his daughter why he cannot yield to Henry VIII’s demand that he declare the king’s first marriage invalid, allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, and hopefully get the male heir the kingdom desperately needs. More knows that that declaration is in the public interest. He also knows that his refusal will sooner or later lead him to the execution block.

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.

To land a top job with Donald Trump, you have to open your fingers. It is, as Solzhenitsyn suggested, the end of your integrity.

Eliot A. Cohen, The Solzhenitsyn Test

The imbecilic clown show 1/6/21 was the least of it

We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

John Adams knew the secret in the heart of democracy: a death wish. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote. And so the American people, in their belligerent stupidity, have again given the awesome power of the presidency to the man who attempted to overthrow the government the last time he was entrusted with that power. Trump has, of course, promised to pardon those who carried out the violence and chaos of January 6, which is no surprise: The riot was conducted on his behalf, and that is the kind of riot he likes. His contempt for the law is utter and complete, and the only law that he honors is the one inscribed on his heart: “I should get whatever I want.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Cheap date

Trump is the CCP’s cheapest date: Trump is scrambling to save TikTok. He’s filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to treat him like he’s already president and to stop this terrible ban of his favorite piece of Chinese spyware. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board puts it: “The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good.”

As background, Trump was against TikTok until. . . TikTok investor Jeff Yass and his wife Janine dropped about $100 million into Republicans in recent years. And then, what do you know, he’s all in for TikTok! Trump asked the Supreme Court not to act all sus on TikTok’s rizz.

Shadow president Elon Musk has deep business entanglements with China, so it’s a given he’s going to be compromised on this. But Trumpo—Mr. CHYNA—made nationalism his whole thing. And all it took was one Republican donor with cash, but not even that much for China, to continue the colonization of teenage American minds through the infectious disease known as TikTok. Democrats at least genuinely believe in the CCP. Like, they prefer it on an intellectual level. Republicans don’t; they’re just for sale, and cheap.

Meanwhile, the White House confirmed this week that a ninth American telecommunications firm has been hacked by China. Per the AP: “Though the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose communications were accessed.” China just reads all our texts and no one even cares. To explain this in a way you TikTok-addled people might understand: America is the unconscious patient in surgery, and our lawmakers are the surgeons and nurses doing a viral dance around our slack-jawed body.

Nellie Bowles. Remember: This is part of Bowles’ weekly sardonic news wrap-up. Take it seriously, not literally.

Simon won his bet with Ehrlich

Be it remembered that Julian (“The Ultimate Resource Simon, in my younger lifetime, made a wager with Paul (“The Population Bomb”) Ehrlich about what would happen to five key commodity prices over the period of the wager. Ehrich predicted that the prices would rise, Simon that they would fall.

As I read The Ultimate Resource, I thought “surely this is some very clever sophistry.” But Simon won the wager. All five commodities fell in real price.

Infinite growth in a finite world still seems impossible (though Simon probably would say the world isn’t finite in any economically significant way because of human ingenuity). There’s also the matter of externalities, about which “human ingenuity” seems kind of cavalier.

But Simon won the wager. That’s not nothing, and it doesn’t fit the left narrative.

Northstar

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

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

Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right (Front Porch Republic)

This is the version of Rod Dreher that first caught my so favorable attention. I’m keeping a wary eye on the current version.

UBI

→ UBI really doesn’t work: It pains me to write this. But yet another study was published that shows universal basic income (UBI) doesn’t work.

Researchers gave $500 a month to a group of California households and compared them to a control group who received no money—quite the short straw to draw. The households that received the stipend ended up only $100 richer and actually purchased more cigarettes. So basically, UBI makes people French. They found that UBI had no positive effect on psychological or financial well-being. It didn’t even improve food security. Except that cigarettes make it so you don’t need lunch, so I guess food security is relative.

I was hoping universal basic income would become a reality nationwide. Then I could pursue my true passions: horseback riding, debutante balls, and cyberbullying.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Title IX

The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.

Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky, rejecting the Biden administration’s novel interpretation of Title IX through federal rule-making.

First-world problems

The FBI has issued a formal warning to sports leagues about organized robberies of professional athletes. Since September, nine pro athletes have had their homes broken into, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Dončić, and Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. According to the FBI, organized crime groups from South America have used high-tech surveillance and hacking methods to spy on athletes and disable their security systems. (It also helps to know when a team is playing an away game.)

Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press

Terrifying Parenting advice

What answer did writer Fyodor Dostoevsky give a concerned mother about how to teach her son the difference between good and evil? “His answer both eased my anxiety and terrified me,” Vika Pechersky wrote for Christianity Today. “On the one hand, Dostoevsky gives simple advice to a set of very complex questions. There is no need to master elaborate philosophical systems and social theories to teach my children the meaning of good and evil. According to Dostoevsky, people have a natural yearning for truth, and this yearning comes to our aid in the work of parenting. Herein lies the terrifying part, for the work of parenting starts with my own self—my love of truth, rectitude, goodness of heart, freedom from false shame, and constant reluctance to deceive. I have to embody the love of truth and goodness and live them out in my daily life if I want to teach my children to love what is good.”

Happy New Year From The Dispatch!

In my anecdotal experience, he’s right.

AI Update

I am, relatively speaking, a grouch about AI, so I’m happy to pass along the bad news.

AI is losing money faster than any technology in human history.

I was stunned when OpenAI said it would charge $200 per month for an AI subscription.

That adds up to $2,400 for a full year. Who pays that much for a chatbot?

But the story gets crazier. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now admits that the company still loses money at that price—the cost of providing AI to premium subscribers is more than $200 per month.

Ted Gioia

Traffic congention

An online forum was getting slower and slower, and users were complaining. An investigation found that the traffic was not coming from users.

Dennis Schubert, who discovered this, shared his irritation in a testy post:

Looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.

Oh, and of course, they don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don’t give a single flying fuck… [about making] my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.

I guess this is the new role for human beings in the digital economy. We teach the bots how to replace us.

Those greedy bots will come back again in a few hours—they always do. So get busy and start posting.

Ted Gioia again.

Why would anyone want to read that?

AI F1 A -FRIEND of mine who sings the praises of AI has suggested that I might farm out Touchstone fundraising letters to Al or perhaps even have it write an article or two for the magazine. What could I say? I shook my head in silence. Failing to catch my meaning, he assured me that improvements to Al over the past year have it writing at a professional level.

“So what?” I said. “Why would anyone want to read it?”

“Because,” he said, “it writes well.”

Again I said, “So what?”

I have all but given up trying to explain my opposition to Al to those who seem to think that, if Al can be programmed to mimic the best writing of which men are capable, then why wouldn’t I want to use it? I tell them that I presume Al is now every bit as capable as they say and will be doubly so six months from now. And still I say, “So what?” And still they earnestly try to convince me that Al writes every bit as well as I just conceded it does.

My friend is a Formula 1 racing fan, so I tried a new angle: “I am certain that if they took the men out of the cars (and the pit crews out of the pits), Al drivers could churn out better lap times than their human counterparts every time.”

He found my suggestion ridiculous. “Who would want to watch that?”

-J. Douglas Johnson, Touchstone magazine, January/February 2025

Patience takes a lot out of you

His father said, “Kindness takes more strength than I have now. I didn’t realize how much effort I used to put into it. It’s like everything else that way, I guess.” … “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength—patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”

Marilynne Robinson, The Gilead Novels (I can’t way which Gilead novel; I have a Kindle version including all three.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

December 28, 2024

Culture

Texas

Also, whenever I read this paragraph to people who don’t live in the South, they get hung up on the fact that we had furniture devoted to just guns, but in rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires.

Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (a book that I haven’t read, but this quote came to my appreciative attention).

Pacifying the bathroom battlefield

I have a solution to this kind of nonsense: why do we need separate men’s a women’s bathrooms?

In parts of Europe or the Middle East (two areas where I’ve traveled; I can’t remember in which I saw this), toilet cubicles have walls that extend to the floor and close to the ceiling. The doors close against jambs, leaving no vertical cracks people can see through. Men and women queue up, using the same sinks for handwashing but using cubicles one at a time without sexual distinction.

Maybe that’s too grown-up for America, though.

Burke

Society is “a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and those obligations take priority over our rights.”

Damon Linker’s summary of Edmund Burke’s conservative view.

Exiting the bubble

To work at The Free Press, though, you have to completely exit the bubble. This is one of the things I’ve come to value most about it. My colleagues and our contributors have opinions across the political spectrum—and consequently, we publish articles across the political spectrum. I’ll admit I found it annoying during the presidential campaign that many of my colleagues kept hitting Kamala Harris over the head with a two-by-four. But I couldn’t deny the rationale—that the Democratic presidential candidate fundamentally had nothing to say. When Bari was asked why we focused more on Harris than Donald Trump, she replied that the legacy media was all over Trump, and somebody needed to hold Harris’s feet to the fire. I couldn’t disagree.

Joe Nocera, It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Pity the pacific

Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.

Duncan Trussell via Andrew Sullivan

Abigail Shrier

What she learned in 2024

As my friend Caitlin Flanagan likes to say: “The truth bats last.” Boy, does it ever. And sometimes, the truth knocks it out of the park.

Abigail Shrier, author in 2021 of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, who had a very solid vindication in 2024. That the initial reaction to her sensible observations by the bien pensants was so hysterically negative shows that “craze” was a well-chosen word.

Duplicity

The Free Press had a celebrative article about Abigail Shrier’s vindication:

History should also note that some of the individuals and institutions that are supposed to protect our freedom of expression actively tried to suppress Shrier’s work.

Chase Strangio, the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, and a transgender man, pronounced a kind of epitaph for what the ACLU used to stand for when he tweeted about Irreversible Damage: “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

This is the same Chase Strangio who, a few weeks ago, was forced to admit to the Supreme Court that the “dead daughter or live son?” question whereby the trans cult emotionally blackmails parents into consenting to medical transition for gender dysphoric daughters is a lie, that suicide is not a major problem in gender dysphoria even without transitioning.

Trump 47

Taming the press

Trump has figured out how to emasculate the media and make them tame lap-dogs. Freedom of press is enshrined in the 1st Amendment, but much of the press (e.g., Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) is owned by billionaires with multiple other business interests that don’t have clear constitutional protection:

The leverage point Trump has recognized is that most major media properties are tied to some larger fortune: Amazon, Disney, NantWorks (the technology conglomerate owned by Soon-Shiong), and so on. All those business interests benefit from government cooperation and can be harmed by unfavorable policy choices. Trump can threaten these owners because he mostly does not care about policy for its own sake, is able to bring Republicans along with almost any stance he adopts, and has no public-spirited image to maintain. To the contrary, he has cultivated a reputation for venality and corruption (his allies euphemistically call him “transactional”), which makes his strongman threats exceedingly credible.

Jonathan Chait, Trump Has Found the Media’s Biggest Vulnerability

A lot of very powerful people seem to have reached the same conclusion. The behavior of corporate America toward Trump this past week can be understood as a product of two beliefs. One: Under the new administration, the U.S. government will function like a protection racket. Threats will be the currency of politics. Either you pay for the president’s “protection” or you get squeezed.

Two: As this unfolds, most Americans won’t care a bit.

…

A news industry owned and operated by oligarchs is easy pickings for an unscrupulous authoritarian because those oligarchs have many points of financial vulnerability. Trump doesn’t need to hurdle ABC News’ First Amendment rights in order to win his suit when he can sidestep those rights by squeezing [ABC’s owner] Disney instead.

Nick Catoggio

The answer may be to get a higher proportion of your news from sources like The Free Press (see Joe Nocera, above) or The Dispatch. (see Nick Catoggio, immediately above, though Nick only does commentary, not news).

Cover the children’s eyes and ears

Is Mr. Trump an irrevocable break with the past?

He isn’t the old-style president who allows you to say to the kids, “I’d like you to be like that man.” Jimmy Carter with his personal rectitude, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush with their virtues—Mr. Trump is a break with that, and the way he spoke when he first announced in 2015 made it clear. When he spoke of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, “and some, I assume, are good people,” which is a very Trumpian formulation, I thought, that’s not how presidents talk, you have to be measured, thoughtful, kindly.

I thought: That’s bad. But my sister and uncle thought it was good. They understood what he was saying and why he was saying it, they agreed with him, but they also knew he couldn’t walk it back. He couldn’t be elected and then say, “Oh, I changed my mind, on second thought we need more illegal immigration.” They felt the crudeness of his language meant that he was actually telling them the truth. It was a relief to them. “Forget eloquence, close the border!” They felt if the right policy requires a brute, get the brute.

Could a Lincoln become president today, a Reagan?

Peggy Noonan

Health Care

We have lots and lots and lots of ordinary, routine, foreseeable medical expenses that we should be paying for as though they were a cup of coffee or a Honda Civic, and we would almost certainly have radically better and more affordable care in those areas if we did. If your complaint is that people can’t afford to do that, then you have a tricky question to answer: If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it? Even if you deduct private profit and corporate administrative costs and such from the equation (which is nonsense, but, arguendo), the math doesn’t get a lot better. If your answer is “My nurse practitioner is too greedy—she drives a Lexus!—and rich people don’t pay enough taxes!” then you are a very silly person who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Of adolescent “gender medicine”

A few years ago (confirmation hearings, I suspect):

[U.S. Surgeon General nominee Rachel] Levine refused to answer, choosing merely to say that “transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care that have been developed.” Paul hit back that “the specific question was about minors,” and accused Levine of having “evaded the question.” Paul continued: Do you support the government intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia? You have said that you’re willing to accelerate the protocols for street kids. I’m alarmed that poor kids with no parents, who are homeless and distraught, you would just go through this and allow that to happen to a minor.

Rand Paul Demands Answers on Puberty Blockers for Minors (February 2021)

That “robust research and standards of care” is essentially a incestuous echo chamber. In that echo chamber, “everybody knows” some things that aren’t true. But gradually, clarity intrudes, first in the Cass Report from Great Britain, most recently on Thursday just passed:

There were a couple of moments in the oral arguments in US vs. Skrmetti this week that were truly clarifying, I think. The first was about suicides among children and teens with gender dysphoria. They are — as the ACLU lawyer, Chase Strangio, finally conceded when questioned by Justice Alito — “thankfully and admittedly rare.”

That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because the most common argument used by doctors and activists for child sex-changes for years is that if the kids do not transition, they will kill themselves. “Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?” is the question that has been repeatedly, routinely, posed to freaked-out parents with a dysphoric child. That’s why the Biden administration routinely refers to life-saving “gender-affirming care.” It’s transition or death. In every discussion I have ever had on this topic with someone who supports sex changes for kids, this has always been the first point raised.

…

We sometimes think of this trans controversy as a debate about civil rights and medicine. But it is useful at times to step back and truly grasp the radicalism of the ideology fueling the “LGBTQIA+” movement, to see what its vision of humanity is. We are socially constructed abstractions, not bodies. We have no core sex. The core goal of critical gender and queer theory — which is what is behind the child sex change craze — is to end the sex binary entirely as an organizing principle for our society. It is to remove nature from our understanding of what it means to be human. It is as extreme in its epistemological gnosticism as in its philosophical nihilism.

It is not about helping the few, and never has been. It’s about revolutionizing us all.

Andrew Sullivan

He’s not wrong. But M. Gessen seems more wrong than right:

Trans and gender-nonconforming people have existed as long as humans have used gender to organize themselves — think Joan of Arc; think Yentl; think many, many real and fictional people in-between — but in Western culture, it’s only in the last half-century that trans people have asserted ourselves as a group. It was only when we became more visible that the onslaught of new discriminatory laws began.

M. Gessen (f/k/a Masha Gessen) at the New York Times.

Two observations:

  1. “Trans and gender-nonconforming people” don’t belong together as a category. Lumping them together feeds the fad Andrew Sullivan calls “transing away the gay,” whereby gender-nonconforming adolescents are told “Maybe you’re a boy in a woman’s body” (or vice-versa), which isn’t a real thing.
  2. It’s nothing new for subterranean activity to be ignored by the law until it surfaces (“asserts itself”). Then, sometimes, the law decides it’s bad and disfavors it in various ways. There’s even a maxim for it: the law isn’t made until first it’s broken. An assertive movement based on the fantasy of women in men’s bodies and vice-versa is likely to be rejected fairly decisively.

Finally, Nellie Bowles may have the best response to the nonsense — mockery:

Chase Strangio is on the wrong side of the vibe shift: The Supreme Court this week heard arguments over whether to strike down Tennessee’s ban on medical gender transitions for minors (i.e., no puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries till 18). The ACLU sent their most famous lawyer and the face of the organization, Chase Strangio, to argue the case. Before things started, Chase laid out the stakes to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “These are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.” So: a two-year-old. When I say to my two-year-old that she’s a funny bunny, she says, “No, kitty cat.” Which to me indicates an extremely advanced and gifted conception of herself. Anyway. Surgery for her tail is next week. She has been consistent that she’s a “kitty cat” for months now. She wears kitty cat ears, a woeful stand-in for the real thing that I’m sure some excellent doctors can arrange.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared banning medical transitions for minors to bans on interracial marriage. I’m no legal scholar, but it honestly must be fun for your job to just come up with crazy analogies and throw them back at terrified lawyers. I’m just not sure I see the connection she’s making, but I also sometimes throw spaghetti at the wall when nothing’s working. It’s my “why not” business strategy. It’s the “you know what else was illegal once? Interracial marriage” approach.

Nellie Bowles

The reality as it comes to me is that many kids with gender dysphoria are working through a growing awareness of attraction to their own sex. We know how tumultuous modern adolescence is, and confusion about sexuality adds yet another layer of tumult.

Given time, and denied “affirmation” that the real them is trapped in the wrong body (though not denied love and “watchful waiting” medical and psychological care), they emerge as fairly well-adjusted homosexuals. Affirmed, too many of them only later realize that they and they enablers were too hasty, and they de-transition insofar as the changes wrought are reversible.

Maybe that’s just something I picked up in my echo chamber, but I haven’t heard anyone deny the part about “watchful waiting” leading to resolution without transition — or, rather, the only denial I’ve heard is the bogus “live daughter or dead son” trope.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Potpourri

Not (especially) political

Wisdom from the third world

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

A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. I regret losing the URL, but offer the following in complement:

Serenity in leisure

There is a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from a recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course; and there is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, page 47.

What do you do for a living?

Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,” “park ranger,” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment, and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was, “What do you do for a living?”

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

… but liars can figure

I saw an item in the Wall Street Journal very recently:

Here’s a statistic to remember next year, as Congress debates extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts: The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden. Self-styled progressives will never admit it, but U.S. income taxes are already highly progressive ….

Then I saw a Politico item lamenting how little income tax the super-wealth pay on their increase wealth.

So, is someone lying?

Yeah, pretty much. Increased wealth doesn’t imply taxable income. I’m confident that the increased wealth figures Politico cited were mostly unrealized capital gains, which we don’t tax for a number of very good (if not ironclad) reasons.

Infrastructure century

Because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed full of cheap paneling and plastic furniture, why public schools look like overgrown gas stations, why courthouses, firehouses, halls of records, libraries, museums, post offices, and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses. The dogmas of Modernism only helped rationalize what the car economy demanded: bare bones buildings that served their basic functions without symbolically expressing any aspirations or civic virtues.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

How long will this hold?

Most Americans say media criticism helps hold politicians accountable | Pew Research Center

One of the things I worry about is unaccountable local officials now that the internet has killed smaller local media. The Lafayette Journal & Courier is a wraith, all but invisible were it not for stories fed from other Gannett papers. WLFI has been gutted with departures as its owner, Allen Media Group, bids billions for new acquisitions but doesn’t pay its bills. Only national politics is really covered any more, and that in only a selective way:

Trans teen health

In oral arguments at the Supreme Court Wednesday, ACLU lawyer and transgender ideologue Chase Strangio was forced to admit that gender realignment surgery for children does not prevent suicide—a core claim of many trans activists, notoriously communicated to parents by doctors as “do you want a live girl or a dead boy?” (Source: The Free Press)

What’s left of the trans argument against Tennessee law, in my view, boils down to “it’s sex discrimination to allow estrogen for girls, testosterone for boys, but not vice versa” — an argument that begs the question of whether the brute fact of sexual binary has any implications for law and medicine.

Wordplay

as man became disenchanted with regards to God and the cosmos, he became enchanted instead with himself and his own potential

Jake Meador

Just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.

Matthew Crawford

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis

[T]he forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

A Catholic expat friend of Rod Dreher

Two from Dreher’s latest book

Politics

Thankfulness

The Free Press has its people weigh in on what they’re thankful for at Thanksgiving. Martin Gurri responds:

This year, the petty little man in me is thankful that I won’t have to listen to Joe Biden’s double-dribbling sentences or Kamala Harris’s sitcom canned laughter ever again. The greedy analyst in me is thankful that Donald Trump is coming to burn Washington, D.C., to the ground, so Bari Weiss can keep telling people that I’m the only human on Earth who understands this dread pirate. The lonesome immigrant in me is thankful for my wife, and children, and grandchildren, my country and my street, my plans and my memories—because they make high politics feel like a trivial dream that I wake up from, when I step away from my laptop.

Pete Hegseth

I don’t trust Trump, and it seems to me as if he’s deliberately staffing up with sexual predators — as if that was proof of a decisive “get-things-done” manliness.

Moreover, I distrust pretty boys like Pete Heseth, Gavin Newsom, etc. (Yeah. Maybe there’s a little envy there.)

Nevertheless, I’m withholding my final judgment on Hegseth’s suitability for DoD because his accusers are hiding behind anonymity.

Pardon power

[T]he President is only accountable to the electorate so long as he or his party are up for election. Once the election is over, there’s no one for voters to punish. That’s why Biden waited until after the election to pardon Hunter; why Trump did the same for Steve Bannon and Roger Stone; why Obama did the same when commuting the sentences of Chelsea Manning and the terrorist Oscar López Rivera. And, most notoriously, that’s why Bill Clinton waited until his last full day in office to pardon the fugitive Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution and whose ex-wife donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

Stephen E. Sachs, How To Ban Lame-Duck Pardons

Feather pillows

It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Black Friday?

For how much longer will “Black Friday” remain a thing when its sales started at least over the last weekend?

Miscellany

Nellie Bowles gives thanks

  • After watching a funny short video that shows Joe Biden seeming to wander into an Amazon rainforest, I realized to my shock that Joe Biden is still there. He’s still standing at podiums looking translucent and confused, but technically upright. When I see him, every fiber in my body wants to put a blanket over his shoulders. And so this year, I’m thankful for our presumed president: Dr. Jill Biden.
  • I’m thankful for Kamala Harris’s campaign. First of all, they raised $1.5 billion dollars and spent it in 15 weeks. It sounds wasteful. But in fact, taking $1.5 billion dollars from some of America’s silliest people and then giving it away to hardworking ones is what I call distributive justice. Just think of the caterers who had to work around literally dozens of Kamala staff’s allergies and gluten intolerances. They deserved that cash. Think of the event planners, young women who want to save up for their own extravagant eco resort weddings. Kamala gave them a shot at Hawaii instead of the Dominican Republic. Think of the driver of that abortion van clocking overtime during the DNC who just told himself “eyes ahead, not your problem, eyes ahead.” So many worthy Americans.
  • I’m thankful this year for the First Amendment. I never understood how precious it was, or how rare, but watching European countries send cops to people’s houses for barely controversial Facebook posts has shocked me. I know we have European readers and writers, so please know I stand with you, and I hope you don’t take it personally when I say I’m so glad our forefathers fled your lands and burned the boats. We’ll do our best now to save you through a process that I can only describe as colonialism (Free Press expansion into Europe). God bless America. And Little America, as we’ll call England!

TGIF

How the Ivy League Broke America

James Conant and his colleagues dreamed of building a world with a lot of class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. Conant dreamed of a nation ruled by brilliant leaders. We ended up with President Trump.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

Let’s blame Occam’s nominalism

Ideas, he said, was not a work of philosophy but “an intuition of a situation,” namely, a situation in which the “world . . . has lost its center.” Weaver traced that loss back to the rise of nominalism in the twelfth century, a familiar pedigree that is both accurate and comical. It is accurate because the modern world—a world deeply shaped by a commitment to scientific rationality—does have a root in the disabusing speculations of nominalism. It is comical because to locate the source of our present difficulties on so distant and so elevated a plane is simply to underscore our impotence. If William of Occam is responsible for what’s wrong with the world, there’s not much we can do about it.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

Understanding Russia (a little better)

Finding a way in which Russia could make a genuine contribution to the “common good of mankind” was a key objective of Russian intellectuals at this time. Some concluded that the only way of doing so was by deepening the process of Westernization. Others felt that Russia could never contribute original ideas to humanity if all it did was copy the West. Thus was born the split between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. It is necessary to bear in mind, however, that the Westernizers and the Slavophiles had the same objective—to enable Russia to contribute to universal progress.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

Politics

Perfidious political coin

Challenged by a letter to the editor for his former column, Liel Leibovitz gives nary an inch:

Never do I argue that the perfidy which is our political coin emanates exclusively from one side of the political aisle. But any dispassionate student of American history, observing the chaos of the previous decade, will emerge with a rather clear picture and a rather clear culprit.

It was the omnivorous machine, controlled by Barack Obama’s Democratic Party but now incorporating everything from our newsrooms to our classrooms to our boardrooms, that spread the wild conspiracy that America’s forty-fifth president was a Russian asset. It was the same machine that refused to repudiate this story, even when the facts were available and clear. It was the same machine that harnessed law enforcement agencies to harass and intimidate public servants, and that pursued the flimsiest of legal pretexts to pursue political enemies.

This sordid history doesn’t lack documentation. Nor is it, sadly, history: When fifty-one former heads of our intelligence community, including several retired heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, vow that the “rumor” concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop is misinformation peddled by Moscow, only to remain completely silent when said laptop appears in court and confirms precisely what anyone willing to listen and think had known all along—namely, that Hunter Biden Jr., and most likely his father as well, have had some questionable dealings for fun and profit with Ukrainian magnates and other shady characters—then you know we’re in Screwtape territory.

None of this is to suggest that the only morally commendable solution is a vote for Donald J. Trump come November, or, for that matter, that the Republican candidate is an unblemished moralist worthy of the priesthood. That, of course, is equally untrue. But, as a great American once said, the bastards changed the rules and they didn’t tell us. Now that we know, though, we’ve but one obligation: Fight back, fight hard, and win.

I don’t agree with his conclusion about our “obligation” (my convictions are with Paul Kingsnorth’s Moses Option on that), but his premises seem sound — which is why, in the end, I endure the Election of Donald Trump with substantial equanimity.

On the oddly disparate cabinet picks

Ross Douthat, Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet (unlocked). Douthat seldom disappoints me, and this wasn’t one of those occasions.

Destruction in the wake

It has long been clear that the rise of Donald J. Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it.

It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well.

After three Trump elections, almost every traditional Democratic constituency has swung to the right. In fact, Mr. Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree, according to New York Times estimates. In each case, Mr. Trump fared better than any Republican in decades.

Nate Cohn, How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message

If you have any appreciation at all for silver linings, surely you should appreciate that Trump was not, relatively speaking, elected along racial lines.

The Very Online Culture Wars

Whether it calls itself the Right or the Left, the real content of all online politics is the internet itself, and the arc of online politics always bends towards a bunch of strangers who spend their entire lives on the computer demanding that you publicly denounce your friends.

… To pun on Wilde, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the ritual outrage performed by the [Very Online Left] in the wake of the 2024 election.

Insofar as the election was an affirmation of the [Very Online Right], I find much less to applaud …

Pretending to ourselves that Trump II represents a culture war victory threatens to render traditionalist accounts of the true, the good, and the beautiful incoherent …

Is there anything truly conservative about Trump II? Can a party whose convention platforms an unrepentant stripper with a face tattoo be conservative? Can a party that valorizes a techno narcissist who has proudly fathered twelve children, one of whom is named X Æ A-Xii and another of whom is named Techno Mechanicus, with three different mothers still pretend to be conservative? And this is not even to mention Trump himself, whose public persona is built on violations of nearly every verse from Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount. The VOR represents the Silicon Valley mantra “move fast and break things” with more enthusiasm than it does any of the principles articulated by Kirk.

There is no place in the [Very Online Right] for Kirk’s elaboration of the conservative principle “that there exists an enduring moral order” and that this order “is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent”.

Matt Stewart, The Very Online Culture Wars

Kudos to Seth Moulton, truth-teller

Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature

Rep. Seth Moulton, (D. Mass) via this Times article (paywall)

Now is the FIRE’s hour

Trump’s team has announced an aggressive agenda to do exactly what his critics called for: use the power of government to attach expression they think is false, misleading, disloyal, or otherwise bad. The Trumpists want the FCC to assert more power over cable and the internet and use that power to punish enemies. They want the government to use its power to attack journalists they hate. They want to protect protestors they agree with, however violent they were, but use state force and authority and deportation to suppress protests they don’t agree with. The Trumpists have a long record of abuse of defamation lawsuits and are aligned with Federalist Society luminaries who want to make it easier for the rich and powerful to sue for defamation. Trumpists want to impose ideological requirement for vast numbers of civil servants and to investigate government employees for disloyalty. In short, they want to flex government power to punish speech they don’t like.

… Private actors, emboldened, may escalate violence and abusive litigation. Norms and traditions and values, we’ve seen, can fail.

Popehat

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Columbus Day (observed)

History Rhymes

As it turned out, Yeltsin probably did not need to conduct a political campaign in the usual sense. As the Party’s hostility became more evident, Yeltsin’s popularity rose. The public attitude was that anybody the Communist apparatchiks detested must be a hero. The campaign the Party waged against Yeltsin was not merely futile; it was Yeltsin’s strongest political asset.

Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

Hostage situations

Republicans can’t unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.

But Democrats can’t say that a human being with a penis is not a woman.

Both major parties are hostage to crazies.

Hearsay High Dudgeon

Of Ta-Nahesi Coates

“Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

Helen Andrews.

I have no personal opinion of Mr. Coates. One of my then-favorites, Rod Dreher, was in awe of him as a writer, but before I read anything of his (save possibly a magazine article or such), he turned dour (that much I knew) and pretty much dropped off my radar.

But Andrews’ description of the worst active racism he personally experienced reminds me of a pattern I’ll call “hearsay high dudgeon.”

One notices such things, first, in one’s adversaries. 30+ years ago, my fair city, followed by the sister city across the river and my fair county, decided that we desperately needed to add sexual orientation to our human relations codes. There was no precipitating hate crime. The precipitant was merely that a liberal city councilman’s son came out, and the ordinance amendment felt like a father’s homage to his son.

As I listened to the heated public comments, I waited for evidence that we had unjust discrimination in our collective hearts. In three sets of public comments (one in each of the three jurisdictions in question), I heard one first-hand complaint from a lesbian whose military career was somehow deflected (I do not remember the details) before the military began liberalizing on such matters under the Clinton administration. (Of course, our local ordinance wasn’t going to change how the United States military treated such matters.)

But then there was one other first-hand account of local adverse effects: a male college student’s two male roommates no longer wanted to live with him after they found his stash of gay porn. Arguably, the Ordinances would have made that actionable as “discrimination in housing.” But was that discrimination “unjust”? Do we really want government intruding on roommate preferences?

Yes, we do in my community. Or maybe the testimony was irrelevant because our representatives just know, without evidence, what homophobic blackguards their constituents are.

Only later did I begin noticing similar things said by my allies. Various Christians also live in hearsay high dudgeon, collecting and cherishing accounts of “persecution” against other Christians.

Isn’t it pretty debilitating to present yourself or your tribe as victims to gain sympathy?

* * * * * * *

I have a sequel to the preceding. Some readers might wonder why I opposed extending anti-discrimination measures to the attribute of sexual orientation. They might even be indignant that I did that.

In large part, it was because I don’t think all “discrimination” is invidious (or unjust, if you prefer). “Discrimination” can be the epithet version of “discernment,” a very good and important word.

Let me illustrate. Suppose you run a government institution for troubled adolescent girls. Suppose you need staff and are determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent girls.

Of course you have rules as safeguards against sexual predation, but rules can be broken.

Should you be discerning and recognize that hiring a man likely to be sexually attracted to some of his charges, in a position that allows unsupervised access to the objects of his desire, is a formula for disaster and scandal? Or should you follow your nondiscrimination ideology and hire him if he is otherwise the best candidate, perhaps giving yourself a pat on the back for open-mindedness?

Now flip that script. Suppose one runs a government institution for troubled adolescent boys. Suppose one needs staff and is determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old “out” gay man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent boys.

Same questions.

If you said you’d hire the gay man, consider the story of Greg Ledbetter (and Angela Kalscheur, too – she illustrates the first hypothetical). Greg Ledbetter was the recipient of the legislative homage, the son who came out to his father the City Councilman who started the gay-rights ordinance balls rolling.

Ledbetter was hired by a home for troubled boys after he was “out” to anyone in town who paid any attention. A few years later, two of those troubled boys came forward to say he preyed on them sexually. The local press declared editorially that they were put up to the accusations by fundamentalist homophobes and that the episode was an illustration of blackguard homophobia. Somehow, Ledbetter’s defense attorneys got a signed retraction from one of the boys and the charges went away.

But the accusations were true. Ledbetter had even videotaped the encounters, as Wisconsin police discovered when they investigated him for similar sexual predation up there more than a decade later.

He’s in custody for the rest of his years. His journalistic enablers are complicit in the abuse of dozens of boys — and they didn’t do Ledbetter any favors either.

I didn’t know at the time whether the 1990s accusations were true or false (I had spoken to the boys, but did not undertake to represent them legally) nor do I expect that the journalists would have known. What I expected from the journalists was something better than damnable conspiracy theories about fundamentalist Christians, a fundamentalist being anyone more conservative than the journalist. The journalistic reaction was tribal, not rational; gay is good, conservative Christian bad.

I did not think that a gay man inevitably would bugger boys in his charge if given the chance any more than a straight man would copulate willy-nilly with nubile girls. But I was good and damn sure, from personal experience of male adolescence and young adulthood (from which vantage point some adolescent girls remained alluring), that the chances were way too high for his hiring to have been defensible.

Saying “no” to his application would have been “discernment,” not “discrimination.” But the Ordinance we passed categorically forbids any “difference in treatment in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations” based on sex or sexual orientation (or other attributed). No discernment is allowed.

Democrat conspiracy kooks

The claims had a powerful effect on public opinion among Democrats, just as Trump’s ranting and raving is doing now among Republicans. In March 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that an astonishingly high 66 percent of Democrats believed that in 2016 Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president — a claim with no more evidence behind it than Trump’s current assertions about being deprived of victory by voter fraud.

Damon Linker at The Week

Victimhood

In all seriousness, I am offended by the “typical” public school turning Orgasms for All After You Buy Consumer Crap You Don’t Need into our tacit national religion. But I’m roughly as offended by “Christian” clergy and school officials deceptively indoctrinating kids in sectarian Christianity*.

Remember that, dear Christian, next time you’re tempted to paint us as uniquely victims of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist varies from place-to-place.

Empty pantsuit

The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

… Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.

…

Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.

Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on.

Andrew Sullivan, who thinks Harris is losing.

Miscellany

  • In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
  • At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)

Frank Bruni

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Wednesday, 10/2/24

You may be relieved to know there’s nothing today explicitly about the 2024 Election or any of the candidates in it, save for this one personal thing.

In a fit of righteous (I hope) indignation, I believe I recently wrote that if Indiana is in play come November 5, I would vote for Kamala Harris. Reminded of the centrality of permissive abortion to her campaign, and of the extremity of the national Democratic Party’s support for “transitioning” as its signature (and aggressive) response to adolescent gender dysphoria, I retract that ill-considered position. I could say more about why these two issues combined are deal-breakers, but I’d be borrowing heavily from J Budziszewski if I did (see also Concurring with Exemplary Clarity below).

I re-affirm that I will write in Peter Sonski & Lauren Onak.

Where are the conservative yard signs?

Think about yard signs. The progressive ones read:

Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights = Human Rights
No Human Is Illegal
Science Is Real
Love Is Love
Diversity Makes Us Stronger
Kindness Is Everything

What would ours say? There are “conservative” yard signs for sale. But they contain no moral vision, nothing to believe in, only an effort to “own the libs.”

Our cupboard is so bare that young men are filling auditoriums to hear Jordan Peterson tell them to clean their rooms.

Oren Cass, Constructing Conservatism.

In my weaker moments, I’ve been known to look for an “own the libs” yard sign in response to the mincing sentiments of the progressive sign quoted, but nothing I found (and I found very little) was anything I’d put up in my yard.

The Nicene Creed might fit on a sign, but it would illegible to passing drivers, and I would be taking God’s name in vain if I put it up in rainbow hues.

From Front Porch Republic’s Saturday recommendations

  • “Wendell Berry at 90.” Jonathon Van Maren reflects on why Wendell Berry means so much to so many of his readers: “Berry’s fiction is not only a record of rural life and the slow death of agricultural America, but also a record of the interior lives of Americans before we outsourced our thinking to digital devices and absorbed our worldviews from screens. His novels lack the frantic pace of so many of his contemporaries; reading them, I had to slow my own mind and detach from the mile-a-minute culture wars to match the pace of the men and women of Port William. Always, his stories left me feeling refreshed.”
  • “Why Christian Parents Should Resist School-Issued Screens.” Patrick Miller offers a set of arguments supported by research to help parents push back against the lure of progress. He draws from his own experience on a school board: “We were offered tens of thousands of dollars in grants to pay for one-to-one devices in our classrooms. Saying no felt like stealing something from students. It felt like resisting progress. But we said no anyway, because our pressing question wasn’t ‘How can we restructure our curriculum around new technology?’ but ‘What technologies are best suited to serve our educational mission?’ Technology wasn’t our master; it was the servant. And there wasn’t enough research to prove it was a good servant.”
  • “Life on Mars.” Grace Mackey pens a thoughtful review of Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: “As a member of Gen Z, this was not a light read. When you spend your teens owning a smartphone, you grow used to hearing your parents and teachers blame your problems on a phone— It gets tiresome. I understand the skepticism towards Haidt and the concern that he is a grumpy old man tired of watching the online world expand into something foreign to him. I had some of that skepticism. Regardless, I picked up his book because I was genuinely curious if he offered explanations of anxiety that I hadn’t heard before. This past year, I started therapy because I needed help managing my anxiety disorder. While reading, it didn’t take long for my skepticism to fade and alarm to set in. I was struck by how deeply I resonated with what Haidt described.”

Front Porch Republic

“I was there” at the founding of Front Porch Republic, having followed several of the founding curmudgeons (e.g., Patrick Deneen, Jason Peters) before they coalesced. FPR has changed, but I still find it very much worth reading still — the Saturday curation of others’ articles especially.

Concurring with exemplary clarity

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas handed down a decision (Texas v. Loe) upholding that state’s law prohibiting medically irreversible and damaging transgender treatments for minors. The Court held that, in passing the statute, the Texas legislature employed its constitutionally legitimate power to promote the health and welfare of the state’s citizens. The law does not infringe upon the rights of parents to determine the medical care of their children or the rights of doctors to provide care.

Justice Jimmy Blacklock wrote a concurring opinion that laid out the issues at stake with exemplary clarity. He observed that the case turned on fundamental and mutually exclusive assumptions about what it means to be human.

Within the Traditional Vision, human males and females do not “identify” as men and women. We are men and women, irreducibly and inescapably, no matter how we feel. Proceeding from these moral and philosophical premises, the Traditional Vision naturally holds that medicinal or surgical interference with a child’s developing capacity for normal, healthy sexual reproduction is manifestly harmful to the child, an obvious injustice unworthy of the high label “medicine.”

Against this view, Blacklock ranges the alternative—“call it the Transgender Vision.” This view “holds that we all have a ‘sex assigned at birth,’” and thus assigned, it “may or may not correspond to our inwardly felt or outwardly expressed ‘gender identity.’” Under these assumptions, “the Transgender Vision holds that an adolescent child who feels out of place in a biologically normal body should in many cases take puberty-blocking drugs designed to retard or prevent the emergence of sexual characteristics out of line with the child’s gender identity.” It manifestly follows that parents and children have a right to this kind of treatment, just as they have a right to other medical procedures that promote well-being.

The Traditional and Transgender Visions “diverge at the most basic level.” The disagreement is metaphysical, as it were. Judges need to recognize that debates over medical procedures and disputes about empirical claims concerning the efficacy of transgender treatments “are merely the surface-level consequences of deep disagreement over the deepest questions about who we are.” The Traditional Vision sees the treatments as “self-evidently harmful to children,” whereas the Transgender Vision regards the same treatments as “necessary medical care.”

The constitutional question amounts to this: Does the Texas Legislature have the proper constitutional authority to legislate in accord with the Traditional Vision? Or does the Transgender Vision enjoy a special, privileged constitutional status, which the court must honor? Blacklock observes that it would be very strange for a judge to answer “no” and “yes.” How could anyone reasonably hold that the Traditional Vision, which has held sway from time immemorial, can’t serve as a rational basis for determining what accords with the health and welfare of citizens? And on what basis can a judge determine that the Transgender Vision enjoys privileged status, given the fact that it has never “obtained the consent of the People of Texas”?

A great deal of testimony in this case came from medical experts, who insisted that interventions to facilitate “transitioning” enjoy the approval of medical associations and other professional bodies. Blacklock notes that such testimony is irrelevant. “The Texas Constitution authorizes the Legislature to regulate ‘practitioners of medicine.’ It does not authorize practitioners of medicine to regulate the Legislature—no matter how many expert witnesses they bring to bear.” Quite right. Doctors and researchers are free to adopt metaphysical assumptions. But so are legislators. And when those assumptions conflict, those of elected legislators determine the law, not those of “experts.”

Blacklock gets to the nub of our debates about transgender ideology (and pinpoints the specious reasoning of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision): Those urging transgender rights “claim that the Transgender Vision is an established matter of science, not a matter of belief.” But saying it does not make it so. “From the perspective of the Traditional Vision”—I would say, from the perspective of any clear-thinking person—“any such assertion is an inherent conflation of speculative philosophy and empirical science. Neither a philosophical proposition (‘gender identity is real’) nor a moral rule (‘gender identity should be affirmed’) can be proven with scientific method or the tools of medicine.”

Medical associations, academic journals, and universities have become captive to progressive ideologies, transgender ideology among them. They are certainly not trustworthy sources of moral wisdom. And they are increasingly untrustworthy sources of empirical truths. Kudos to Justice Blackwood for so clearly explaining why their distorted moral presumptions and perverted science should not be accorded transcendent legal authority.

R. R. Reno in First Things.

Reno has steered First Things so far in a MAGA (and Roman Catholic) direction that I was resolved to drop it. Then came the October issue, with Oren Cass’ article, Constructing Conservatism, three erudite responses to it, and this item, which I had not seen elsewhere. I guess I’ll be in for another year, but it sure is a bleak landscape most months.

Effete aristocrats

The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

…

In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

Matt Taibbi on fighting back against the censors

The Airplane Class

A: One plane flight a year cancels out a lot of “environmentalist” talk.
B: I have been saying this for years. It’s even more true if CO2 emissions are all you care about; on those grounds alone you’re better off trading your Tesla for an F250 and canceling that trip to Europe. But airplanes are to one class what trucks are to another, and it’s the airplane class that runs things. Environmental policy, like everything else, is too often a matter of whose ox is being gored.
C: The airplane class is definitely a thing–and boy how [do] they love to lecture the bumpkins.

I didn’t ask permission to identify the writers (none of which was me), but thought the “Airplane Class” was a useful construct.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Saturday 9/28/24

This is Purdue’s Homecoming weekend. They’re playing football — or pretending to. I’m looking forward to basketball season.

Miscellany

An odd job title, if you think about it

“Content Creator” is a title that inadvertently tells on itself. It’s a tacit admission that the nature of the “content“ is meaningless and it exists to fill space. Might as well call yourself “Stuff Maker” or “Thing Doer.”

Dominic Armato via Alan Jacobs

As wrong as possible

“Poverty just doesn’t happen,” Rep. [Barbara] Lee, a California Democrat, declared at the launch of the “Children’s Budget,” a kind of progressive wish list, last week. “It’s a policy choice.” Rep. Lee has run up against a kind of metaphysical limit there: She is as wrong as it is possible for a human being to be. 

As practically every serious thinker about the issue has understood for a few thousand years at least, poverty does just happen—it is, in fact, one of the few things that does just happen. Poverty is the natural state of the human animal. Do nothing, and you will have poverty. Thomas Hobbes knew it. Aristotle knew it 2,000 years before Hobbes. Hesiod knew it centuries before Aristotle. The authors of the Upanishads knew it centuries before Hesiod. “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man,” the American sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein observed. Or, as Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime explaining to an apparently impenetrable public, poverty has no causes—the absence of poverty has causes. Rep. Lee’s error is not novel. Her mistake repeats—nearly verbatim—the error of Rep. Ayanna Pressley: “Poverty is not naturally occurring; it is a policy choice.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Nothing more freeing

Of The Bulwark’s Mona Charen:

In 2018, she appeared on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. When asked about feminism, she attacked her own tribe, saying, “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites on sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women. And because he happens to have an R after his name, we look the other way; we don’t complain.”

The crowd erupted in jeers and shouts of “Not true!” Charen had been a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan! This was CPAC, Republican prom! Security guards escorted her out for her own protection.

The incident didn’t seem to shake her. “There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth,” Charen later wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Olga Khazan, Never Trump, Forever

Decades ago, Mona Charen was one of my favorite conservative columnists. I rarely read her these days because, in the anti-Trump cosmos, I’m on planet Dispatch and find planet Bulwark a bit weird tedious. Thus has the black hole of Donald Trump disrupted the cosmos.

What unites us

Americans are less divided politically than the media likes to pretend.

Yes, it’s a big, diverse electorate, but there are certain opinions we all share. Like this one: I can’t believe the party I hate isn’t getting clobbered in the polls.

From the Liz Cheney left to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right, ask any voter at random whether they’re surprised at how close this race is, and my guess is they’ll talk your ear off in exasperation.

Nick Catoggio

Banned Books Week

The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

Vice and Virtue

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, via J. Bottum

The gay guy pundits agree

Harris’ Context

I can’t say what Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite word is — the one time I met with her, I didn’t ask — but I’d put a big stack of chips on “context.” She said it not once, not twice, but three times in her signature May 2023 “coconut tree” riff, and I’ve heard it tumble from her lips on other occasions as well. It’s like some oratorical caftan, warming and comforting her.

That turns out to be apt. Her bid for the presidency is all about context.

Any realistic response to it hinges not on the policy details that she has or hasn’t provided, not on the fine points of her record over time, not on her interview with Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC on Wednesday, not on her previous sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash. It hinges on context. She cannot be sized up outside of or apart from the alternative, a man of such reprehensible character, limitless rage, disregard for truth, contempt for democracy, monumental selfishness and incoherent thinking that even discussing Harris’s virtues and vices feels ever so slightly beside the point. She’s not Donald Trump.

Frank Bruni

The words are different but the melody’s the same

In the culture war, we know exactly what she is: an equity leftist, a strong believer in race and sex discrimination today to make up for past race and sex discrimination yesterday, and a politician who favors redefining womanhood to include biological men, and conducting medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children, based entirely on self-diagnosis. These are her values, they are the values of every Dem special interest group, and she assures us they have not changed. I believe her.

…

I have yet to hear her say a single interesting or memorable thing in her entire career. Have you?

…

If a serious Republican candidate were up against her — even Nikki Haley — this election would not be even faintly close.

But we do not have a serious Republican candidate.

We have the most shameless charlatan in American political history — and there are plenty of competitors. He is unfit in every respect to be president of the United States …

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election … I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it.

He is not lying when he insists that he won in 2016 and 2020 by massive landslides in the popular vote. He believes it. He believes he will win by a landslide in November, and there is no empirical evidence that could convince him otherwise. If he loses the election, he will call it a massive fraud one more time, and foment violence to protest it. We know this more certainly than we know anything about Kamala Harris. He tried to leverage mob violence to disrupt our democracy once. If that was not disqualifying, nothing is …

…

So I will vote for Harris, despite my profound reservations about her. Because I have no profound reservations about him. I know who he is and what he is. I know what forces he is conjuring and the extremes to which he will gladly take his own personal crusade. To abstain, though temptingly pure, is a cop-out. I vote not for Harris as such, but for a conservatism that can emerge once the demon is exorcized.

And exorcize it we must. Now, while we still can.

Andrew Sullivan

Other thoughts on POTUS Election 2024

Uninteresting and unmemorable

We have to guard that spirit. Let it always inspire us. Let it always be the source of our optimism, which is that spirit that is uniquely American. Let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired to solve the problems.

Kamala Harris. I hate to belittle her, because her context is him, and he is everything that Bruni and Sullivan said. If Indiana is in play, I’ll vote for the sane-but-empty suit who’ll leave office in 2028 if defeated, leaving our political system intact.

Suttons Bay, MI, last week

Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

My last NYT “gift article” for September, and one of the most important. Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

Even when he’s right, he’s wrong

Somebody apparently told Trump about, say, ProPublica attacking the Dobbs decision (substantially reversing Roe v. Wade). His over-the-top response, directionally right, was this:

When speaking to supporters from the swing state, where both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have doubled efforts to capture the election count in November, Trump lamented the criticism aimed at the Supreme Court‘s conservative supermajority and said it should be “illegal.”

“They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it,” said the former president. “It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision”

Trump Says People Criticizing Supreme Court Justices Should Be Jailed

So he also is profoundly ignorant of our most fundamental rights, including the right to say stupid things about any branch of government we care to kvetch about.

Some Nationalist, this

Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot. 

He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to [a] debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist. 

Trump lives in a very strange little bubble: His world is Palm Beach, a handful of golf courses and hotels, and Fox News. The smallness of his frame of reference is a problem for him ….

Kevin D. Williamson

Trump’s victims

Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Women who have said he “squeezed my butt,” “eyed me like a piece of meat,” “stuck his hand up my skirt,” “thrust his genitals,” “forced his tongue in my mouth,” was “rummaging around my vagina,” and so on.

Mr. Trump has denied any misconduct. He, in turn, has accused the women of being “political operatives,” plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” looking for their “10 minutes of fame” and not being his “type.”

“It couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen,” Mr. Trump sneered during a recent news conference, referring to Ms. Leeds, the one who accused him of assaulting her on an airplane. “And she would not have been the chosen one.”

Jessica Bennett, Trump’s Female Accusers Are Begging You Not to Forget Them

He can’t even deny his sexual assaults without:

  1. Sneering at how homely his accuser is and
  2. Tacitly admitting that he assaults women lucky enough to be “chosen.”

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Tuesday, 9/24/24

We’re home at last from a vacation overshadowed by car damage from road debris encountered on the way north to vacation. Every fix revealed yet another problem. Every new problem required a wait for Allstate to approve the added work. We finally just drove our rental car home yesterday and are currently planning how most easily to retrieve our car when they finally fix the final problem.

I have nothing more to say on that, lest I add myself to the luckiest victims in the world (see below).

Not very political

The huge history of a little bit of geography

The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. I think I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Epistemic idiocy

A man who murdered dozens of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand was “steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet,” … His manifesto explained that he had done research and developed his racist worldview on “the internet, of course. . . . You will not find the truth anywhere else.”6 The latter assertion involves, alas, a rather serious mistake about epistemic authority.

Brian Leiter, Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority.

This is a flawed but important article I personally will revisit on the subject of legitimate epistemic authority. We’re not as adrift and it sometimes seems — or as the New Zealander fancied himself.

ProPublica

Having apparently run out of Supreme Court justices to attempt to drive from public life, the left-wing nonprofit journalistic outfit ProPublica has directed its attention to sullying one of their most notable achievements: the Dobbs decision, which returned the power to regulate abortion to the people and to the states. Georgia now has a heartbeat law, which outlaws abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health). A recent ProPublica article blamed the law for the deaths of two women who had taken chemical-abortion drugs (whose riskiness goes unremarked upon). The drugs killed the children but failed to expel all of their remains. One woman unsuccessfully sought treatment in a hospital, and the other feared it—both, supposedly, results of the law. But as our former colleague Isaac Schorr pointed out at Mediaite, the law does not forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child. No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise, which may be why ProPublica did not include the relevant portion. Even the argument that the doctors’ uncertainty about the law prevented treatment is unsubstantiated. The ProPublica article eventually admits that “it is not clear” why doctors waited to perform the necessary procedure. Laws against abortion haven’t caused any deaths, but ProPublica is doing its part to raise the death toll.

National Review email newsletter

The luckiest victims on earth

[E]ven as you push back against ideological bias and discrimination, remember that as a university student you are one of the luckiest — most privileged — people on the planet. So do not think of yourself as a victim. You can assert and defend your rights without building an identity around grievances, however justified those grievances may be.

…

Remember that the criticism of a belief (or a practice, faith or lifestyle) is not a personal attack, though the natural human tendency to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions can make it feel as if it is.

Robert P. George, A Princeton Professor’s Advice to Young Conservatives

Two bits of advice from a mensch

  • I don’t pin dreams on the rack of endless above-ground interpretation, but I do give them space and attention.
  • In myth, when you are facing a monster, look at its reflection on your shield, not the abyss of its face. That will quickly burn you to cinders. What is your shield? Well it’s something that shows you the general shape of your adversary but not to the degree it paralyses you.

Martin Shaw, We Need The Ancient Good

Hitchens’s Razor

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Via 17 useful concepts to survive the election

Political

Countercultural decency is exhausting

The yearslong elevation of figures like [North Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate] Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

… I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

David French

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

In a similar vein, albeit from someone who hasn’t been Republican:

There is no place for dissenters in the contemporary Republican Party. That is going to remain true whether or not Donald Trump prevails in November. It’s long past time those who reject the right-populist takeover of the party to cut themselves loose and stop pretending they will have a meaningful say in building its future. They will not. It would be far better for them, and for the Democrats, if they joined the Donkey Party outright and began fortifying the Harris-Walz campaign’s move toward the ideological center-left.

In a strong post late last week, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last took the occasion of the latest mind-boggling revelations about Mark Robinson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor of North Carolina, to make the point that the GOP is a “failed state.” The image comes from a 2016 Slate column by his Bulwark colleague Will Saletan. As Last explains, functional institutions “have power centers and interests. In a healthy institution, these power centers can unite to achieve shared interests, even in difficult moments which require sacrifice.” Over the last two decades, for example, Democratic Party has given us the following examples:

In 2008 Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the Democratic presidential nominee. But various Democratic power centers coordinated to elevate Barack Obama, who they believed was a better candidate.

In 2016, a democratic socialist tried to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The party coordinated to prevent him from doing so.

In 2020, the same democratic socialist made another attempt. The party coalesced around Joe Biden and got him elected president.

In 2023, as Republicans went through four nominees to find a speaker of the House, Democrats voted, unanimously, time after time, for Hakeem Jeffries.

And in 2024, when the Democratic Party realized that Joe Biden was compromised as a candidate by his health, they convinced him to step aside.

I want to underscore this: The Democratic Party was able to convince a sitting president to abandon his reelection attempt four months before November.

That’s a portrait of a party as an effective, functional institution.

The Republican Party, by way of sharpest contrast, cannot even get a man to step aside in a crucial statewide race when he’s caught (among other things) describing himself as a “Black Nazi” on a porn-focused chat forum. The party is being held hostage—by the candidate, yes, but his power is itself a function of his popularity among Republican voters in the state. They want him as their nominee, and the voters get whatever they want in the contemporary GOP. Which means the institution is a hollow shell—or the domestic equivalent of a failed state.

Damon Linker

Sorry, Damon, but I’m not going to be in the vanguard of any GOP migration, partly because I’m not exactly in the GOP, partly because of a few deal-killer Democrat policies.

The Bennet Inversion

Our best hope is to hasten a change in culture that reverses this effect. Call it the Bennet Inversion, for Senator Michael Bennet, who campaigned for president promising to govern so boringly that voters would go weeks without thinking about him. He was so successful that no one remembers his campaign at all. Biden accomplished a miniature version of this, by executing a Fabian strategy and defeating Trump without ever facing him directly on the field of meme battle.

Graeme Wood, Trumpism Is Harder to Fight Than Terrorism

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Elevation of the Holy Cross 2024

I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to take the time to sort these into topics.

Also, it’s a major Feast day in the Eastern Church. The Orthodox Church at my vacation destination appears to be postponing observance to tomorrow — an Orthodox oddity in my limited experience.

Selling hoi polloi a delusion

Those with a material interest in doing so have learned to speak autonomy talk, and to tap into the deep psychology of autonomy in ways that lead to its opposite.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Purposeful to a fault

Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Sit quietly with that one for a minute. Then consider Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

“Televangelists”

Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines
Weeks of tense standoff in the Philippines have ended in the capture of a pastor accused of leading an international ring of sex abuse and trafficking of young women and girls.

New York Times

I don’t believe it would be fair to saddle any Christian tradition or denomination with this guy. From what the Times says about the idolatrous adulation he cultivated, he was plainly some kind of one-off cultist.

But I have no idea how many one-off cultists are abroad in the world, when this admonition currently being featured at the end of my Sunday blog posts:

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Huge (if true)

Donald Trump runs no risk of going to prison in the middle of his campaign, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan’s decision Friday to postpone sentencing until Nov. 26. The delay gives his lawyers more time to prepare an appeal. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, his trial was overwhelmingly flawed, and a well-constructed appeal would ensure its ultimate reversal.

A central problem for the prosecution and Judge Merchan lies in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” That pre-empts state law when it conflicts with federal law, including by asserting jurisdiction over areas in which the federal government has exclusive authority.

Mr. Trump’s conviction violates this principle because it hinges on alleged violations of state election law governing campaign spending and contributions. The Federal Election Campaign Act pre-empts these laws as applied to federal campaigns. If it didn’t, there would be chaos. Partisan state and local prosecutors could interfere in federal elections by entangling candidates in litigation, devouring precious time and resources.

That hasn’t happened except in the Trump case, because the Justice Department has always guarded its exclusive jurisdiction even when states have pushed back, as has happened in recent decades over immigration enforcement.

The normal approach would have been for the Justice Department to inform District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was contemplating charges against Mr. Trump, of the FECA pre-emption issue. If Mr. Bragg didn’t follow the department’s guidance, it would have intervened at the start of the case to have it dismissed. Instead the department allowed a state prosecutor to interfere with the electoral prospects of the chief political rival of President Biden, the attorney general’s boss.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley, Why Trump’s Conviction Can’t Stand

They evolved

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

Mark Leibovich, Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump

Change of perspective or sign of deline?

The eighteenth-century Humean slave of the passions is thus indistinguishable from the liberated, twentieth-century Sartrean individual living authentically.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

All that matters is strength

Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on [the abortion] issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”

The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century B.C.E., rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.

Michelle Goldberg

I think Goldberg, no Christian, is right. And that means that it’s hard to say that MAGA and I share the Christian tradition; their religion seems from a darker source.

Ted Cruz is no dummie

Liz Cheney famously endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, and less famously endorsed Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred over Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Texas Senate seat.

So has she abandoned the GOP?

I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.

Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.

At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.

I would vote for Cheney and every other Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump following the insurrection in hopes that their victories would embolden others in the party to resist his power grabs in a second term. And I would vote against Trump and all of his co-conspirators for the opposite reason, in hopes that their defeats would convince others that civic crime, like trying to overturn an election on false pretenses, doesn’t pay.

Ted Cruz was Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election, initially agreeing to argue before the Supreme Court that the electoral votes of swing states won by Joe Biden should be thrown out. When the court declined to hear that case, Cruz switched to Plan B and ring-led a scheme on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory by objecting to those swing-state electoral votes. Had he gotten his way, some sort of chaotic ad hoc election “commission” would have been thrown together before Inauguration Day to decide who the next president should be.

He did all of this knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term. But he was willing to pay that price because he thought making himself useful to the coup would give him a leg up with Trump’s base when he runs for president again someday.

You don’t need to agree with Colin Allred on a single policy issue to grasp that a person like Ted Cruz cannot be trusted to defend the constitutional order. He was tested and failed grievously. If you believe that a second Trump presidency would create a “unique threat” to American government, as Liz Cheney and I do, it’s urgent that Trump’s most unethical enablers in Congress be replaced by people who won’t rubber-stamp anything he does.

Republicans in Texas had their chance to replace Cruz with a candidate like that in this year’s primary, just as Republicans nationally had their chance to replace Trump. They made their choice. Cheney and I have made ours.

It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. To a certain sort of partisan, it seems, Trump is the only elected Republican who bears meaningful responsibility for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the scores of House GOPers who voted to object on January 6—they’re all off the hook because, well, there are just too many of them to punish. Beating them at the polls would wipe out the party, and partisans won’t tolerate that. Even for just one election cycle, to teach their representatives a hard lesson about authoritarian bootlicking.

If you feel obliged to excuse Ted Cruz for his role in a coup plot because that’s what hating Democrats requires of you, you do you. But let’s please stop memory-holing his part in it by feigning confusion as to why Liz Cheney might want to drive him from politics. It’s pathetic.

Nick Catoggio

Ted Cruz is no dummie. He’s whip-smart and cunning. He also is a contemptible human being with no core. His mentor, Princeton’s Robert P. George, must be deeply grieved.

Shanghaied

  • Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
  • In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
  • Preferences about the next American president seem to be nearly as divided among Chinese intellectuals as they are among the American electorate. A senior scholar of international relations told me that Donald Trump would likely be more willing to cut deals with China but that he preferred Kamala Harris because of her greater predictability on the international stage. A senior economist told me that Kamala Harris might prove softer on tariffs but that she would prefer Donald Trump because of his greater predictability on economic policy. The only consistent refrain was the preference for perceived predictability: Chinese elites seem as discombobulated by the sense that it’s impossible to predict what Washington might do as they are by any specific action the next president might take.

Yasha Mounk, 3 of 21 Observations About China

The All-Volunteer Navy at Play

The chief petty officers aboard the USS Manchester (LCS-14) were caught illicitly placing and using a Starlink satellite-internet antenna while the ship was under way. The conspiracy, involving all senior enlisted sailors attached to the littoral combat ship, came to light after months of use, when a civilian contractor came aboard and stumbled upon the bootleg setup. The ship’s command senior chief and ringleader of the operation was convicted at court-martial and reduced in rank from E-8 to E-7: an outrageously light penalty considering her repeated lies to her commanding officer, her background in Navy IT that ensures she was absolutely aware of her transgression, and the cover-up campaign that involved the intimidation and silencing of those below her. This betrayal of the ship’s whereabouts in service to movie-streaming, texting, and other forms of personal entertainment is especially egregious because of the role that chiefs have in preserving good order and discipline among the ranks while upholding Navy traditions. A bad chief is the ruin of a ship and its crew, and the legal equivalent of keelhauling the only correct recourse.

National Review’s The Week Friday email. See also the Navy Times.

Donald Trump after the debate

The Hill: Trump Floats Punishment For ABC After Debate

I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Via The Dispatch

This response is fractally wrong. ABC doesn’t need a license to be a news organization (thank God and the First Amendment).

If they did have a license, it would be dictatorial to revoke it for displeasing the President or anyone else.

Trump once again exhibits his anti-democratic impulses, though once again it probably will deter no fans.

Lesser evils

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

…

But when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

Pope Says Both Trump and Harris Are ‘Against Life’.

Donald Trump seemingly is Teflon-coated, but explicit Papal permission to vote for the (more) pro-abortion candidate could logically be a factor in this election.

Even WSJ is appalled

Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.

She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.

In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.

All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.

As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

On the other hand …

If anyone is looking for facts to support a vote for Trump despite loony Loomer (and everything else), these two graphs may be just the ticket. The Biden administration has not covered itself in glory on illegal immigration.

The yellow bar is illegal immigrants and those awaiting adjudication of asylum claims or other claims to remain.

See the Wall Street Journal story.

Where customer service and stalking overlap

Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.

Frank Bruni

Life goes on

O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.

Wendell Berry

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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