Category: SCOTUS

The End of an Eventful Week

Culture

Wry truism

Paul Krugman compared the welfare of Europeans with that of Americans: “It should count for something that there’s a growing gap between European and U.S. life expectancy, since the quality of life is generally higher if you aren’t dead.”

Frank Bruni

Über-speak

  • One suspects, rather, that noisily associating with driverless cars helps to preserve Uber’s image as a “tech” company, rather than as an especially aggressive practitioner of labor and financial arbitrage. Beneath the cutting-edge hocus-pocus, Uber’s “driver-partners” appear to have entered a sharecropper economy from which it is difficult to exit.
  • We should notice that while driverless cars hold real potential to ease congestion, and thereby contribute to the common good, there has been no talk of treating as a public utility the infrastructure that will make driverless cars possible, nor of making their programming available for inspection. What is being proposed, as near as one can make it out through the fog of promotional language, is an “urban operating system” of mobility that would be owned by a cartel of IT companies, participation in which would not be optional in any meaningful sense. … In the mentality of corporate libertarianism, there is no concept of legitimate public authority as that which secures the interests of citizens against the power of monopoly capital.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

Transing the gay away

There’s a genre of aphorism in the form “If you don’t like X, just wait ’till you see Y.”

I’m not sure “transing the gay away” is any improvement over “praying the gay away,” but it’s what we’ve now got.

[T]he vast majority of children with gender dysphoria are gay or lesbian; and this is the target population for child sex changes. How can you tell which kids are going to end up as transgender and which will become gay or lesbian? The official answer is that it is clear in every single case. The actual answer is that we can’t know for sure. But if the policy is that any child who merely says they are the opposite sex cannot be questioned, and must be fast-tracked toward an irreversible sex change, we have a huge danger: that gay children will have their bodies wrecked, their fertility ended, and their sex lives stunted because we have erased the trans and gay distinction, and, in fact, merged the two.

Andrew Sullivan on The Meaningless Incoherence Of “LGBTQ+”.

Miscellancy from TGIF

  • Tucker Carlson went to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. In his announcement prefacing the interview, he says that while many American journalists have interviewed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.” Well. I’m sure every major outlet has tried: Putin, who hates free speech and hates a free press, simply refuses … Putin is the reason we don’t hear from Putin. And there is a real American journalist in Russia right now: that’s Wall Street Journal reporter and current Russian prisoner Evan Gershkovich, who we see only when he’s marched into a plexiglass box for another hearing in his show trial. ….
  • Nextdoor’s stock is collapsing, which personally makes me a little happy. You see, Nextdoor started as a useful neighborhood communication tool. The trouble is, neighbors like talking about things that the idealistic young workers of Nextdoor don’t approve of, namely crime. You guessed it. Yes, among each other, neighbors, at least in my area of Los Angeles, often talk about which house on the block was broken into and whether they were attacked or just robbed, things such as that. Bad talk, you baddie homeowners … Bad talk has been suppressed on Nextdoor, where you may discuss only things that twentysomething engineers (who live in guarded apartment towers with doormen) agree is healthy. Like juice cleanses. …
  • Speaking of places I don’t need the government, this week Florida’s Ron DeSantis is supporting a state ban on lab-grown meat. “You need meat, OK? We’re gonna have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said. “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.” …
  • Dartmouth is bringing back the SAT requirement for all applicants, a first for the Ivy League, which made the SAT and ACT optional in 2020. The argument was that all tests are racist, and what’s not racist are extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations. Yes, there is nothing more egalitarian than being the goalie on a travel hockey team, a $10,000 trip to Ecuador to volunteer, and a stunning letter of recommendation from a teacher who has eight kids in her class. Sure, all studies show that the SAT has a surprisingly egalitarian effect across race and class. But dropping the test was worth it for these schools. Why? Because knowing SAT scores makes it much harder for Harvard and Yale to legally discriminate against Asians. Anyway, Dartmouth really does want to know who’s actually smart, so they’re bringing it back. What else is happening in education?

Nellie Bowles

The late, great David Graeber

There seems a broad consensus not so much even that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Recommendations

  • There is a young, Christian writer named Bethel McGrew who is now on my radar and probably should be on yours. Taste her Substack.
  • Poems Ancient and Modern is a publication about poetry. Joseph Bottum, a writer in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina, choose and comment on poems, old and new, ancient and modern. Drawn from the deep traditions of English verse — the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive — the poetry, with its accompanying commentary, demonstrates that poetry still enthralls the ear, instructs the mind, and aids the soul.
  • Rebecca Solnit, How to Comment on Social Media.

Sporty

The story that’s almost as big as the game

I had some reasonably good quotes here from David French on the supposed political conspiracy behind — oh, I dunno — Taylor Swift becoming popular and getting a hunky NFL boyfriend, all the better to re-elect Joe Biden.

I’m not going to blog them because I think this “story” is nut-picking that turned into a journalistic murmuration.

In other words, I know I’m out of touch with MAGA-America, but it appears to me that the people obsessing about this “story” are opportunistic journalists and pundits (sorry David), not Trumpists.

I wrote every word of the preceding three paragraphs before Freddie deBoer came along and did an even better job of debunking this stuff: Perhaps Taylor Swift Isn’t the Defining Political Issue of Our Times. (Trigger warning: the full article contains Marxism.):

[I]t turns out that when you spend your time making fun of the stupid nonsense conservatives are spending their time freaking out about, you are also spending your precious time on earth on stupid nonsense … There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes.

After reading Freddie, I didn’t have the stomach to read an Atlantic story on the cosmic significance of Joni Mitchell at the 2024 Grammy Awards.

Wherein I comment on a sportsball

I generally am not a big fan of sportsball of any kind, but I’ve become more of a fan of Premier League soccer (the stamina of those guys is a marvel) and I’m an intense (if fair-weather) fan of Purdue Men’s basketball.

After #2 Purdue’s road win over #6 Wisconsin, sportswriters are saying things like “Purdue basketball shows it is elite, even when not its best” (Sam King) and the equivalent, elaborated nicely by Greg Doyel.

I’ve got to disagree. The team play on the road against Wisconsin is Purdue at its best. Its best is not Edey scoring 30 points, or Loyer raining down 3-pointers. Not when an opponent defends Edey and gives few open looks on 3s like Wisconsin did.

Lance Jones 20, Braden Smith 19, Zach Edey 18. That inversion is Purdue at its best, and it’s why they’ve got an unusually good shot at the NCAA Tournament.

Just sayin’.

Trump-adjacent

ICYMI

February 8, 2024 was a very, very, very good day for a certain Donald J. Trump.

  • All who listened to SCOTUS are confident he’s headed back to the ballot in Colorado.
  • The Special Counsel report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents was devastating to Team Biden.

(H/T Advisory Opinions podcast for that insight.)

I’d sooner drink muddy water than say “congratulations;” I’m just laying out the facts.

The limits of democracy

Trump Doesn’t Threaten Democracy—He Embodies It – WSJ

I know there’s a meta-argument that Trump “threatens democracy.” But the more obvious argument is that he embodies it, and it’s making a lot of people understandably sick with anxiety.

My point is that “democracy” is not worthy of our worship and never was.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

That, gentle reader, is our problem.

What can a traditional Republican do?

The moment Trump launched his insurgent campaign in June 2015, the old [Republican] order began to crumble. Now the rabble was calling the shots—and it had found its tribune.

This displaced a lot of intellectuals who had gotten used to the old way of doing business. They now had three options: They could find another line of work and thereby disappear into the American woodwork; they could become Never Trump dissenters, which either meant keeping the old fusionist-conservative remnant alive for some hoped-for fantasy future (The Dispatch) or becoming post-Republican centrist Democrats (The Bulwark); or they could try and adapt to the new Trumpian order of things on the right.

The staff of First Things, long after I’d departed, took the third path, as did many others at both old and new magazines, think tanks, and digital media outlets. Some of the work these people did and continue to do is worthwhile in trying to put policy meat on the bare bones of right-wing populism/nationalism.

Damon Linker, The Right’s New Abnormal Normal.

Linker is not wrong about First Things, to which I’ve subscribed since its sane beginnings. As a charter subscriber to The Dispatch, I guess I’m now basically a fusionist-conservative, waiting for “some hoped-for fantasy future.” I know that I frequently think “if that’s what ‘conservatism’ is today, then I’m not conservative,” but I’m as yet unconvinced that the present populist moment is what conservatism is.

“Trump? we already did that one.”

It is well to remember that pundits fail:

The Constitution says that if Trump is impeached and then convicted, he can be banned from running for president again. Trump run again? Democrats should only be so lucky. The media culture does not allow second chances, whatever the Constitution may say. “Trump? we already did that one.” He’s over. He lost the election by 10 million votes. Is there anyone who has become more sympathetic to Trump since Election Day?

Michael Kinsley: Against Impeachment

Peggy Noonan schools the press

How should the press cover a presumable Trump-Biden presidential rematch? More pointedly, how should it cover Donald Trump?

The history that precedes that question is well known. In 2015-16 the media, having discovered that Mr. Trump was a walking talking ratings bump and being honestly fascinated by his rise, turned the airwaves over to him knowing he couldn’t win. He won. In a great cringe of remorse and ideological horror, many did penance by joining the “resistance.” The result: Mr. Trump wasn’t stopped—he got a whole new fundraising stream out of “fake news”—but journalism’s reputation was drastically harmed.

Peggy Noonan, who goes on to share detailed ideas on how the press needs to rehabilitate that damaged reputation.

Election 2024

We’re now looking at an election pitting the 14th Amendment against the 25th.

National Review

I don’t know what it will take for some folks to acknowledge that our American Experiment can fail.
As already noted,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

If it seems like a nonsequitur to blame two notoriously unsuitable major-party candidates on immorality and apostasy, you’ve got a distorted idea of how judgment works: sometimes, it’s just a matter of God stepping back and saying “Okay, have it your way.”

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Purdue at Rutgers

I have nothing to say about basketball. That title is just my answer to the question “how is this Saturday different than all others?”

Update: Purdue plays Rutgers Sunday the 28th. I blew that.

Culture

Fairy tales

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

G.K. Chesterton, writing the original lines, in Tremendous Trifles, Book XVII: The Red Angel (1909)

If Hef had died eight days later

Half the trick of business is knowing when to get out, and Hugh Hefner was a great businessman. “His timing was perfect,” said the New York Times obituary, when he died in September 2017 … But the obituarist was more right about Hefner’s timing than she could have known. Eight days after his death, the same paper published its devastating expose of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults against women, and the #MeToo movement quickly assembled in response. You can’t exactly call it luck when a 91-year-old dies, but if Hefner had lasted two weeks longer, the memorials would have been far harsher judgement about his influence on the 20th century.

Sarah Ditum, Crystal Hefner came too late.

(Beyond that nice lead-in, there’s not an awful lot to see in Ditum’s article. Take it or leave it.)

Right-Wing Progressives

Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.

RWPs are what Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, approvingly dubbed “dynamists”: individuals whose primary vision for a good society is a state of constant Promethean invention, discovery, growth, and transformation. They see their true enemies as what Postrel labels “stasists”: nostalgia-ridden, backwards-looking brutes who hate change and for some unimaginable reason want to keep everything old and therefore obsolete from being replaced by new and better things. Today, from the RWP’s point of view, the forces of stasism just happen to include the Woke left in addition to conservatives.

N.S. Lyons, The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives

Cute. Maybe even valuable (if you’re a sucker for clickbait)

Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean. The concept is amusing and the webpage thus worth a view.

The arts

The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.

David Brooks, * How Art Creates Us*

Substack Nazis

Virtue signalling on Substack

[I]t’s … my belief in original sin that makes me skeptical of one particular kind of story: the “Doing this hurts me but darn it I simply must stand up for my principles” story — which is the tale that a number of former Substackers are telling these days. “Substack is great for me but I simply can’t be on the same platform with all these Nazis” — though as many people have pointed out, Substack has maybe half a dozen Nazis among its zillions of users, and none of the platforms these people are decamping for are Nazi-free either. 

Here’s what I believe: This has absolutely nothing to do with Nazis. The purpose of the campaign is not to expel Nazis from Substack but to create a precedent. If Substack said “Okay, the Nazis are gone, the response would not be “Thanks!” It would be, “Cool, now let’s talk about Rod Dreher.” And then Bari Weiss, and then Jesse Singal, and then Freddie DeBoer, etc. etc. The goal is not to eliminate Nazis; the goal is to reconstitute the ideological monoculture that Substack, for all its flaws — it’s not a service I would ever use —, has effectively disrupted.

Alan Jacobs.

It’s especially affirming that Jacobs lists three Substackers I subscribe to plus one I dropped fewer that two weeks ago (because his logorrheic posts have what feels like a very low signal-to-noise ratio).

A lighter touch

Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?

Megan McArdle, on the absurdity of “Nazis on Substack.” H/T Andrew Sullivan

Legalia

The judge-made doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes a mockery of our civil rights laws, over and over and over again, as police get away with outrages. Judge Don Willet is fed up with it:

[O]ne of the justifications so frequently invoked in defense of qualified immunity—that law enforcement officers need “breathing room” to make “split-second judgments”—is altogether absent in this case. This was no fast-moving, high-pressure, life-and-death situation. Those who arrested, handcuffed, jailed, mocked, and prosecuted Priscilla Villarreal, far from having to make a snap decision or heat-of-the-moment gut call, spent several months plotting Villarreal’s takedown, dusting off and weaponizing a dormant Texas statute never successfully wielded in the statute’s near-quarter-century of existence. This was not the hot pursuit of a presumed criminal; it was the premeditated pursuit of a confirmed critic.

Also, while the majority says the officers could not have “predicted” that their thought-out plan to lock up a citizen-journalist for asking questions would violate the First Amendment—a plan cooked up with legal advice from the Webb County District Attorney’s Office, mind you—the majority simultaneously indulges the notion that Villarreal had zero excuse for not knowing that her actions might implicate an obscure, never-used provision of the Texas Penal Code. In other words, encyclopedic jurisprudential knowledge is imputed to Villarreal, but the government agents targeting her are free to plead (or feign) ignorance of bedrock constitutional guarantees.

In the upside-down world of qualified immunity, everyday citizens are demanded to know the law’s every jot and tittle, but those charged with enforcing the law are only expected to know the “clearly established” ones. Turns out, ignorance of the law is an excuse—for government officials. Such blithe “rules for thee but not for me” nonchalance is less qualified immunity than unqualified impunity. The irony would be sweet if Villarreal’s resulting jailtime were not so bitter, and it lays bare the “fair warning” fiction that has become the touchstone of what counts as “clearly established law.”

H/T Eugene Volokh

Politics

Scene: The US Senate, January 6, 2025

Having so recently pledged not to blog about Donald Trump, I find myself needing to clarify that pledge: it does not extend to commenting on procedures by which we elect presidents.

Which brings me to this stunner:

[N]o matter how the Court rules in Trump v. Anderson [the Colorado ballot excusion of Trump], do not expect Senate President Kamala Harris or a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, on January 6, 2025, to count electoral votes cast for Donald Trump who all Democrats believe is disqualified from being re-elected as President by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will not feel bound to follow the ruling of a Republican Supreme Court. And, that is even without factoring in the likelihood that Trump will be convicted of at least some of the 91 charges on which he has been indicted and that he may lose the popular vote even if he wins in the Electoral College.

Do I think this would be unfair and wrong as a matter of constitutional law? Of course, I do! I, after all, signed a brief by three former Republican Attorneys General in Trump v. Anderson saying that Donald Trump is not barred from being re-elected by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But, if you want to know what Democrats think about this, and what they will do on January 6, 2025, take the time to read Yale Sterling Professor of Law Akhil Reed Amar’s amicus brief, co-written with his brother Vikram, in Trump v. Anderson. The Amar brothers think a Democratic President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House are not bound by the Republican Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson. I would be stunned if all of legal academia and the press did not end up agreeing with them along with some conservative legal academics. So, even if Donald Trump were to win in the Electoral College in 2024, Kamala Harris and the House of Representatives would not count his electoral votes. There is simply no way that Donald Trump can win the 2024 presidential election.

Steven Calabresi, who I don’t think is a “Democrats are utterly evil” nut-case.

So imagine January 6, 2021 in reverse. Mob or not (and if the Dems talk about it in advance, there will be a mob or two or four …), the Senate may do what Mike Pence refused to do: throw out electoral votes for the opposing party. And they’ve got one legal heavyweight behind them already, not a John Eastman whispering deranged theories in secret.

If the Senate does that, all bets on a swell coming decade or two are off. Better for the Country would be that Biden win fair and square. Best of all (I suspect, but dare not pray): that Providence remove both of the geriatric candidates from the race, and soon.

The Republican Party is now useless for conservatives

Accepting Dobbs as the long-term compromise [on abortion] at the federal level is desirable and necessary for reasons unrelated to the abortion issue itself. My own belief—as a pro-lifer and a conservative who also cares a great deal about the rest of the conservative agenda—is that the Republican Party is a lost cause. Right-wing populists–the people who now dominate the GOP–ultimately have no enduring interests beyond symbolic culture war skirmishing and maintaining long-term welfare benefits and other economic subsidies important to white people (SNAP and other programs associated rightly or wrongly with nonwhite urbanites will be on the chopping block, while Social Security and Medicare must be held sacrosanct and corporate welfare remains popular). A new center-right coalition will have to be forged, and a party organized to support it, if conservative policies are to be advanced by democratic and legislative means. The Republican Party is no longer available, in a practical sense, as a vehicle for those purposes.

Kevin D. Williamason

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

A change in blog direction

The pundits all agree that the Republican Presidential Primary is over and that Donald Trump is the winner.

There’s no sign that Joe Biden will step down.

So we’re headed for a General Election between two geriatric cases (one of whom feels non-geriatric because of his manic narcissism).

I probably didn’t start railing against Trump when first he descended the Golden escalator if only because I did not take him seriously. Unfortunately, he soon became somebody who needed to be taken seriously and I have been contemning him loudly ever since at least since June 2016. It’s getting pretty old.

I never intended any implied endorsement of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. But then I never was a Democrat, and I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that would cause a reasonable person to think I was a Democrat. Let them sort out their own problems.

Rather, I was a lifelong Republican until age 56 when a Republican president I had voted for twice used his second inaugural address to commit the United States to a foreign policy that, if taken seriously, meant that the United States would be at perpetual war. “Eradicate tyranny from the world” is how he put it, as I recall.

Despite my having at that moment repudiated the Republican party, my atavistic political impulses still tilted Republican, and that’s why I’ve cared to warn about Trump.

Today’s Republican party is not the one I repudiated. I’m not entirely sure what it is, other than Donald Trump’s party. And neither are you, because it hasn’t adopted a platform since 2016. It’s still metamorphizing.

I think, however, that it is more anti-war than the old party was and by all accounts is a better representation of middle America than the old Republican party or the Democrat party. However, it has chosen as its avatar, a man who is utterly unfit to hold high office, and who wouldn’t care about a party platform even if there were one. And I’m not completely sold on the values of “middle America,” though it’s important to hear its voices. So whatever I might someday like about the GOP when it has finished its makeover, it’s still my former party, not my current party.

“But the Supreme Court!” doesn’t even work any more. Trump II will nominate cronies and certified jackasses, having discovered as Trump I that Leonard Leo‘s favorites take their oaths to the Constitution seriously and are not Trump lackeys.

Within the past few days, my logorrheic buddy, Rod Dreher and Friend of Bari Martin Gurri both have both detailed how far toward the insane Left the Biden administration has drifted (or sprinted). Duly noted, guys. Thanks. I probably was paying insufficient attention.

Both parties think, for reasons that make sense within their respective echo chambers, that the victory of the other spells the end of America as they’ve known it.

I have consistently registered my opposition to Donald Trump. (I withhold judgment on notional “Trumpism without Trump.”)

I now register my opposition to Joe Biden for some of the reasons Dreher and Gurri spotlight but mostly because he seems to have lost most of whatever he once had as a leader and, assuming the best about his intentions, to be captive of the crazies in his party for lack of the chops to fight back.

America is in bad Presidential shape for the third Presidential cycle. Trump’s problems don’t mean Biden’s okay. Biden’s problems don’t mean Trump’s okay. A fortiori, neither’s problems make the other a prince among men. I’m not taking any comfort in any Presidential politics, let alone putting any trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation.

I plan to write in the candidates of the American Solidarity Party for the third Presidential election in a row. I would do so even if my state was “in play,” which it almost certainly will not be.

If any of this changes, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I intend to stop harping on it. As they say of sermons, “nobody gets saved after the first 20 minutes,” and I’ve been going on much longer than that.

I’m trying not even to read about the election, but political clickbait is something of a weakness. I only regret that this means I can’t share things like the image of Trump as a cocaine-crazed squirrel with a stick of dynamite.

All this will probably lessen this blog’s frequency, as politics is convenient filler for lazy writing. I hope it will free up headspace for better things, and that my quality, if not my quantity, will improve.

It’s almost over

Not that the replacement of our 2023 calendars with 2024 will necessarily make a difference, but a guy can hope, can’t he?

Legalia

New York Times vs. OpenAI

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the companies exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or authorization to train their AI systems—including the chatbot ChatGPT—and “wrongfully benefited from” the Times’ journalism. “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works,” the paper argued in the filing.

The Morning Dispatch

Non-lawyers may find puzzling the thought that the main job of law schools is to teach people to think like lawyers. What the heck does that mean?

Among other things, it means that I cannot read an item like this without thinking this is how the common law develops: gripes and competing analogies.

True example: Early in the days of petroleum, Defendant, seeing Plaintiff getting rich off oil wells, slant-drills and taps the same pool of crude oil under Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff sues, saying he owns everything within his borders from the infernal depths to the furthest skies. Defendant says the crude oil is like a highly mobile animal (a “wild, fugacious mineral-animal” was my property law prof’s description) which is rightfully owned by whoever captures it.

Eventually, a body of law develops from the resolutions of multiple cases, each with some different nuances.

So, is OpenAI like a slant-driller? How did those slant-drilling cases resolve? If the answer were obvious, there’d be no lawsuits or they would quickly settle.

An analyst for Yahoo Finance opines:

The way generative AI works by training on existing data and generating new creative content and text is something that intellectual property as a legal framework has not had to deal with. We’re going to have to litigate and get the ruling from the court.

So this is a very important case that I wouldn’t be surprised that if it doesn’t go all the way to the United States Supreme Court because this has to be settled for us to know what the framework is for generative AI.

That first paragraph describes classic common law development.

The second paragraph is dubious: the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases just because they’re important, and an important case filed in state court would likely not get SCOTUS to review it. But this is probably in Federal Court, since it’s under (federal) copyright law, so SCOTUS might take it if it doesn’t like the decision of the Court of Appeals that eventually reviews the District Court decision.

On whether Trump is disqualified

  1. I detest Donald Trump. It would be a great relief to me, though I cannot bring myself to pray for it, were he (and Joe Biden too, for that matter) to drop dead, soon. Some of his followers would spin conspiracy theories, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  2. At this stage of our absurdly-long pre-election run-up, it would be terribly, terribly, terribly divisive to exclude Trump from the ballot. What could serve more deeply to delegitimize the whole Presidential election next year?
  3. The legal arguments about the applicability of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are nuanced, and it’s not just about “insurrection.” The intent of the section was mostly to keep the former Confederate States from sending bomb-throwing racists to the House or Senate, with little worry about a bomb-throwing President, The language of the section arguably sweeps more broadly; but it dances all around naming the Presidency. Did the Reconstruction Congress hide an elephant (the Presidency) in a mouse-hole?
  4. Credible legal scholars deny that the Presidency is a “civil office” of the United States. For instance, Kurt Lash: “According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase ‘civil office under the United States’ did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential ‘Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,’ the congressional precedent known as ‘Blount’s Case’ established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase ‘civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.’“
  5. SCOTUS has tended to go with textual arguments rather than intent. I hope they either revert to intent or find a really persuasive textual reason to allow him on the ballot, and Joseph Story may be just the ticket. Some of Trump’s enemies would spin conspiracy theories or shit-talk SCOTUS, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  6. Then, if Trump is still disappointingly alive and kicking on Election Day, I hope we collectively kick him to the curb by a really convincing margin. (This would be more realistic if the Democrats would turn their attention away from knee-capping Trump and toward a compelling centrist or center-left vision for 2025-2029.)

Culture

Racism

Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.

Bari Weiss, Stop Being Shocked.

Subrena E. Smith, a person of color as such things are styled, proposes that since we invented race for nefarious reasons, it’s time to banish it.

If terrorists win, it will be the transphobes’ fault

Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level … That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt

I’m reasonably confident that General Burt is highly educated, because only someone highly educated could believe such drivel:

You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes. I call “Bullshit” and “Shame on you for trying to shame us, General.”

This is a quote that has stuck with me. Yes, it’s a variation on a populist theme, but there’s enough truth to that theme that The Emperor’s New Clothes has become beloved.

Jung versus Freud

Having felt his own seething unconscious erupt into the midst of normal daylight reality served Jung well in his treatment of schizophrenic patients, who in Freud’s judgment were too far gone to reach, but whose bizarre hallucinations and delusions Jung attempted to comprehend with respect and tenderness. Unlike Freud, who maintained a studied distance from his patients, sitting aloof and serene out of the supine sufferer’s sight, Jung would sit face to face with his charges, bumping knees, exhorting with vehement gestures.

In Jung’s estimation, what healed was not disinterested mind alone following a dogmatic trail through the vast wastes of one’s sexual history, but making contact, demonstrating sympathy, aiming at a comprehensive understanding, allowing the free play of humanity at its best. Jung could see that for patients above the age of thirty-five — life’s halfway mark, or what Dante called nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — their principal concern was not undoing childhood psychosexual knots that persisted into adulthood, but rather finding the authoritative spiritual truth that one could found a serious life upon.

Algis Valiunas, Wounded Healers.

That kind of explains Jungian Jordan Peterson’s style, doesn’t it?

Adult movies — and literature

I used to say that an adult movie was one where they kiss and then the lights go out (because the adults know what comes next).

I’ve now read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, truly adult novels. What child could understand? A rare treat, too rich to binge-read. I can’t even face wading into Lila or Jack immediately.

Journalists are so predictable

After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.

Matti Friedman, The Wisdom of Hamas

Ain’t science great?

  • Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face.
  • By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data.

The Atlantic Science Desk, 81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023

Best Sentences of the Year

Frank Bruni has listed his favorite sentences of the year.

  • [B]ook critic Ron Charles … noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”
  • In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”
  • Of Kevin McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Ron DeSantis, gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024. (Mort Rosenblum)

While I don’t systematically gather, grade, and keep records on such things, I rather liked two sentences from Daniel Henninger:

The most fraudulent word in higher education is “dialogue.” Real dialogue died years ago, replaced by a soft-pillow politics that envelops anything disagreeable and then smothers it.

Speaking of higher education:

Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.

Greg Conti, The Rise of the Sectarian University (Compact Mag) I’m seeing enough good stuff from Compact (which registered with me at its founding) to consider paying its pricey subscription price.

After all the hype, it turns out that “Trump without the crazy” is just an awkward, aggrieved, opportunistic, anti-charismatic, aspiring autocrat with a mile-wide cruel streak and the people skills of Mark Zuckerberg crossed with Richard Nixon.

Michelle Cottle, The Best, Worst and Weirdest Political Stories of 2023

On blogging

Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.

Venkatesh Rao via Alan Jacobs

Politics

Holiday greetings

… MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I think you probably know who posted that on TruthSocial.

“Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.

Nick Catoggio, Farewell to Normalcy — The meaning of 2023

If Trump wins …

If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination for the third straight time and then prevails in the general election, he will have sealed the transformation of his party, given new energy to right-wing populism around the world, and called into question the principles that have shaped America’s security policy since World War II.

Voters will have ratified the outlook that Mr. Trump has advocated since the 1980s: opposition to immigration, multilateral trade treaties and globalization. They would give him the opportunity to enact more extreme proposals in his second term—including an all-out attack on the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and the use of the military to fight crime, immigration and domestic dissent. They would embrace his view of the press as the enemy of the people and agree to an all-out culture war led from the White House. After hearing Mr. Trump declare across the country that “for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” they will have replied, in effect, “Retribution is exactly what we want. Use the government to punish our enemies.”

William Galston

Adulting for the children’s sake

Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out.

Peggy Noonan

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Saturday, 12/23/23

Smelling the Roses

I’ll turn too soon to less edifying thoughts, but let’s start with two observations, the first of which I practice while I mostly aspire to the second.

A little humanity

When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.

Tyler Austin Harper via Frank Bruni

The French difference

“The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly. “The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.””

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Segue

In the popular piety of the formerly-Christian West, Monday’s Feast is the equal of Easter, and it’s first runner-up to Pascha (Easter) in the Eastern Church.

So if you want don’t want it to be your “miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about ‘anti-democratic’ attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot” and similar things, you might want to stop reading now.

Politics and law

Of Rudy’s $175 million judgment and bankruptcy

I genuinely am curious who Trump could even staff a cabinet with. Literally everyone who comes near him is either publicly humiliated or impoverished through lawsuits and then also. . . publicly humiliated.

Nellie Bowles.

Suffice that they would not be our best people.

Regarding Colorado

Insurrection

January 6 qualifies as an “insurrection” even under a fairly narrow definition of the term that is limited to the use of force to take over the powers of government. We don’t need to rely on much broader definitions advocated by some legal scholars.

…

As our detailed recitation of the evidence shows, President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully under way, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.

…

As I pointed out in a recent Bulwark article about the case, this goes beyond encouraging violence (as Trump did before the attack) or failing to try to stop it. It amounts to using the attack as leverage to try to force Congress to keep him in power. Using a violent insurrection in this way surely qualifies as “engaging in it,” even if Trump’s other actions fell short of doing so. Even if this somehow still falls short of “engagement,” this and Trump’s other actions surely at least gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of the United States.

Ilya Somin, quoting the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling.

Don’t take the bait

You’ll find no shortage of arguments against the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump is barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving as President, and therefore will be barred from Colorado ballots.

I’ll not rehearse them here except to beg you: Don’t fall for the simplistic line that the decision is bad because it’s “anti-democratic.”

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was intended to be anti-democratic. It assumes that voters might elect an insurrectionist and says, in effect, “We don’t care. Insurrectionists can’t serve. Period. Full stop.”

Oh, yes: One more thing. It may be politically embarrassing that all seven Colorado Justices were appointed by Democrat Governors, but courts shouldn’t let political appearances sway them.

  • Somebody filed a lawsuit.
  • A lower court decided it and one side appealed.
  • From what I hear, the opinions and dissents in 213 pages of Colorado show great effort to get things right, not to carry partisan water or reject the cup handed them.

I wonder how SCOTUS will reverse? I strongly suspect it will. But the rationale will matter.

Our miserable fate

It’s our miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about “anti-democratic” attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot who were adamant about disqualifying Barack Obama in 2008 absent proof of his status as a natural-born citizen.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

Meritorious or not, challenging Trump on 14th Amendment grounds wasn’t tenable politically once he had reestablished himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Nick Catoggio

On the other hand

I bristle at criticism of the Colorado Supreme Court for having the temerity actually to decide a case presented to it without fear or favor.

But Nellie Bowles levels a different criticism, aimed at the people who brought the suit:

The only way to protect democracy is to end democracy: The Colorado Supreme Court decided this week that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency and so cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in the state. Meanwhile, California’s lieutenant governor ordered the state Supreme Court to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the ballot. In doing so, she said that the rules for the presidency are simple: “The constitution is clear: You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist.” Yet even there she is wrong: you only have to be 35. [Tipsy: You also have to be a natural-born citizen, Nellie.]

Anyway, for a long time the standard liberal take has been that Democracy Is Under Threat from Republicans. And Trump certainly tried schemes in Georgia and whatnot, like, the man gave it a shot. But I would say that banning the opposition party’s leading candidate. . . is pretty much the biggest threat to democracy you can do. It’s a classic one, really. Timeless. Oldie but Goodie. The American left was so committed to protecting democracy that they had to ban voting. 

All I’ll say is that once you ban the opposition party’s top candidate, you can no longer, in fact, say you’re for democracy at all. You can say you like other things: power, control, the end of voting, choosing the president you want, rule by technocratic elites chosen by SAT score, all of which I personally agree with. But you can’t say you like democracy per se.

So Colorado, listen, I dream every day of being a dictator. I would seize the local golf course and turn it into a park on day one; day two, expand Austin breakfast taco territory to the whole country; day three, invade Canada. Day four, we ban zoos. My fellow fascists, we’re on the same page. Let’s just drop the democracy stuff and call it what it is.

I’ve become persuaded that somebody ideally should have brought this sort of lawsuit years ago, when Trump wasn’t the GOP POTUS favorite by a commanding margin. But then most of us thought he was politically dead after January 6, so why would anyone bother?

“Eugenicons”

If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence.

Michael Lind

I spent a lot of time wading through Lind’s exposé of conservatives with eugenic sympathies, waiting for him to reveal the smoking gun. He never did.

I’m far from infallible on what’s going down in the world. I’m interested in what I’m interested in and within recent memory began consciously trying to forsake the fool’s errand of understanding everything.

That said, I’m not convinced that “eugenicons” (Lind’s failed attempt at coining a major concept) “have a large and apparently growing influence.” This felt like an article wherein the author got so invested in a theory that he couldn’t face up to its failure at his own hands.

Rank hypocrisy watch

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana was once perfectly content to use the courts to overrule a democratic process, spearheading an effort in late 2020 to collect lawmakers’ signatures in support of a lawsuit in Texas challenging the results of the that year’s election—which, if successful, would have voided millions of votes in four other states. Tuesday, though, Johnson—who formally endorsed Trump’s reelection campaign last month—was impugning the decision in Colorado that, in his view, would short-circuit the democratic process. “Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack,” he said. “Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. We trust the U.S. Supreme Court will set aside this reckless decision and let the American people decide the next President of the United States.”

TMD

Blood

It’s true; they’re destroying the blood of our country …

Donald J. Trump

All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.

Adolph Hitler

Assuming arguendo …

Let us assume for the sake of argument that there is an absolutely massive conspiracy of Democrats against Donald Trump.

Does that assumed fact make him fit for the Presidency? Are we going to elect a manifestly unfit candidate — one who either is ignorant of holocaust history or who consciously is mimicking Adolph Hitler — to punish the Democrats for some underhanded opposition to him?

I’m sorry that Americans are so well-conditioned that they won’t consider voting for third-party candidates, and that a vote against Trump effectively becomes a vote for Biden*, but I can’t vote for him and will probably vote for the American Solidarity Party slate.

(* A reminder that this common trope is sometimes false. We do not elect Presidents by national popular vote. I have several times now voted for third-party candidates when it was apparent from polling that, for instance, my state was going to deliver its electors to Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden, and my vote wasn’t going to change that.)

Culture

Real men, good men, violent men

Pearcey noted first that there is a sharp dissonance culturally between how we think of “real men” vs “good men.” The former are often moral abysses but they display a certain kind of chest-thumping bravado that many associate with masculinity. The latter is honorable, devoted, and principled, but often despised culturally for precisely those reasons, and this applies as much within many churches as it does the culture.

The other point she made: There is a sharp gap in behavior between self-identified evangelical men who don’t go to church (they are statistically the most likely group in most studies to engage in domestic abuse) and evangelical men who do attend church (statistically the least likely to be abusive). At a time when many in the young Christian right are making their peace with manosphere internet Nazis, those two facts fill me with dread. But we owe Pearcey a debt for helping to document not only these two points, but many others.

Jake Meador, * 23 Books for 2023*, recommending Nancy Pearcey’s * Toxic War on Masculinity*.

Dechurching

Meador also recommends The Great Dechurching by Michael Graham and Jim Davis.

There are many, many wrong ideas out there right now about the place of religion in American life: The dominant driver of dechurching is abusive churches. The most common intellectual shift in people who dechurch is toward progressivism. American churches are basically doing fine and the noise about dechurching is largely just a digital artifact, not something tied to life on the ground in local churches.

All of those things are wrong.

The reality is that the biggest drivers of dechurching right now are changes of life, above all moving to a new place. More people dechurch into a secular right wing ideology than progressivism. And the current dechurching wave is the single biggest shift in churchgoing practice in American history.

Graham and Davis will walk you through the data from the study they did with Ryan Burge and then offer application to help call people back to church. And that’s another misconception, by the way: Most people who have stopped attending church are actually willing to come back.

The persistence of religion

A common critical fallacy among liberals of most stripes is the affirmation that reasoned debate is the currency of politics. We want to believe that one simple Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart video will convince people that Pizzagate isn’t real or that Hilary Clinton doesn’t drink the blood of infants. The problem is pretending that logic, evidence, or reason have anything to do with such beliefs. The situation is much more dire, what we’re up against far more insidious; don’t expect to use logic when you’re at a Black Mass. “Everything may be religion,” I said, “but not all religions are good.” Irrationality, superstition, the numinous, and the transcendent—for both good and bad—can never be definitively pruned from our garden. You may as well pretend that language could be abolished as imagine the taming of the religious impulse, even when the aromatic censers of the church have been replaced by some weirdo’s keyboard.

Ed Simon

Simon also referred to Chris Rufo as a “Svengali opportunist.” I liked that very much. I distrust Rufo and have distrusted him since I first encountered him waging dishonest war on critical race theory. (Honest war on CRT is fine, but Rufo once boasted something like:

We’re going to render this brand toxic. Essentially what we’re going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory.

(Paraphrased from here.)

What’s even better than emission reduction?

Following up on this item, it occurs to me that mass disenthrallment with the automobile and a return to walking and cycling would be far better that reducing emissions from tailpipes or building overweight EVs that require a lot of mining of rare earths.

Exasperation speaking

“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”

“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”

Harvard Finds More Instances of ‘Duplicative Language’ in Claudine Gay’s Work – The New York Times

I assume Prof. Fried understands that truth is true regardless of who bears it, so I can only attribute this logical lapse to exasperation at Svengali opportunist Christopher Rufo.

When did foul language become invisible?

I occasionally see glowing reviews of some streaming series or another and wonder “why am I not watching that?” Then I go to the appointed streaming service and recall “Oh, yeah. I watched the first episode. It was so full of foul language that I couldn’t bear it.”

This is not a way of claiming that my own vocabulary is free of expletives, scatology, and occasional profanity. I adopted some of that stuff in my late teens and early twenties to shock my elders into recognition of their folly. Fifty-plus years later, that proto-trolling has proven one of my own lifetime follies.

My point is that foul language is invisible to most critics. There is a prominent Evangelical pundit, generally sound, who I’m nevertheless unable fully to trust because of how he raved about Ted Lasso without noting that its landscape was blanketed with F-bombs.

Saints and Sinners

[O]ne of the first things they teach you is that in the act of reporting, you will inevitably have to depend on information acquired from dodgy people. Saints, being saintly, often don’t know what’s going on; you have to talk to the people who are great sinners.

Rod Dreher

To salvage what’s left of the right’s faith in elections and the judiciary, and frankly to prevent civil unrest encouraged by Trump, the justices will need to reach a certain outcome in this matter regardless of whether they sincerely believe the law supports it. The Colorado Supreme Court accordingly may have viewed its own ruling as an opportunity to rebuke Trump constitutionally in a way that the U.S. Supreme Court won’t be able to, even if it’s privately inclined to do so.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

… Why, then, did his opponents wait so long to pursue this legal avenue against him?

Ironically, I think the answer is that they gave Republican voters more credit than those voters deserve.

…

As I explained previously, those voters have argued at varying times that it’s improper to impeach and remove him from office over January 6 because the criminal courts would punish him; that it’s improper for the criminal courts to punish him because voters would punish him; and that it’s improper if voters punish him because in that case the election must have been “rigged.” That’s the accountability vacuum. Many critics of the new 14th Amendment challenge to Trump’s candidacy have added another facet to it, that it’s improper to use the Constitution itself to punish him because to do so would be “anti-democratic.”

Nick Catoggio

I don’t know if Nick’s a great sinner and I’m a saint, but I’d like to think that SCOTUS doesn’t think that way, because it would mean, in practical effect, that the 14th Amendment Section 3 becomes unenforceable precisely when it’s needed — on the rationale that an electorate poised to elect an insurrectionist is capable of civil unrest at a level that trumps the law.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences. 

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

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.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

More:

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’s Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

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

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

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

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

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

The Bunkinator

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

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

Stop Reading the News

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

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

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

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

The present madness

Gate-crashers

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

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

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

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

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

Boo-boo about BOBOs

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

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

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

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

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

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

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

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

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

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

Effective LARPing the dark side

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

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

David French

Radioactive

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

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

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

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

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

The Druids strike!

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

Hiatus

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

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

David French

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

The best of our few good options

I wish I were confident that the GOP will reject Donald Trump in favor of one of the candidates who is not only sane but willing to act sane. My emotional favorite is Chris Christie because he’s not afraid of Trump. By the time we reach the first primary, DeSantis is going to be in too deep to redeem his cojones from the pawn shop.

But the record of the GOP, from nominating Trump in 2016 to not even adopting a platform in 2020 (tacit message: whatever our Orange Master wants today is what we “stand for”), the GOP has shown itself overwhelmingly worthless. I was well rid of it eighteen years ago.

In hindsight, … Republican inaction after Jan. 6 boggles the mind. Rather than remove Trump from American politics by convicting him in the Senate after his second impeachment, Republicans punted their responsibilities to the American legal system. As Mitch McConnell said when he voted to acquit Trump, “We have a criminal justice system in this country.” Yet not even a successful prosecution and felony conviction — on any of the charges against him, in any of the multiple venues — can disqualify Trump from serving as president. Because of G.O.P. cowardice, our nation is genuinely facing the possibility of a president’s taking the oath of office while also appealing one or more substantial prison sentences.

…

Trump and his allies are already advertising their plans for revenge. But if past practice is any guide, Trump and his allies will abuse our nation whether we hold him accountable or not. The abuse is the constant reality of Trump and the movement he leads. Accountability is the variable — dependent on the courage and will of key American leaders — and only accountability has any real hope of stopping the abuse.

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

David French, Appeasing Donald Trump Won’t Work (emphasis added).

But there’s a big development in the past few days that may move the question out of normal politics.

The long of it is a long and meticulously-argued law review article (PDF download of pre-print), from two Federalist Society member legal scholars, that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars Trump from the Presidency just is would his being 30 years old or not being native-born. (I studied Constitutional Law under Will Baude’s father, but I digress. I got the top grade in the class, but I digress again.)

The short of it is that there’s a simple way of testing the theory: I’m looking forward, insofar as I rank our few good options, to a Secretary of State refusing to put Donald J. Trump on a primary ballot in some state because of his constitutional disqualification. That will start the wheels of justice rapidly turning as Trump challenges his exclusion. The authors of the law review article have already done the Secretary of State’s research and the best counter-argument I’ve seen so far is “the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare!”

[UPDATE: On second thought, the best counter-argument I’ve seen so far is “by broadly construing the disqualifying insurrectionary behavior, we’re opening a Pandora’s box of tit-for-tat ballot exclusions.”]

It’s hard to imagine that some blue state Secretary of State won’t do it, even though Biden might prefer Round 2 with Trump. Ambition is a powerful motivator, and an elected Secretary of State has abundant ambition.

Alternately, some MAGA-wannabe Secretary of State lets him on the ballot and, say, Chris Christie challenges it on the basis of Section 3. It’s about as long as it is wide; that gets the issue before the courts, too.

I also hope Trump’s disqualification comes up in the debate Wednesday.

If you’re thinking “How dare you cheer denying the people their choice!”, my answer is that the very purpose of some parts of the constitution is to deny the people some choices. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, for instance, had in its initial cross-hairs the possibility of former confederate states electing insurrectionists to office, and it slammed that door shut tight:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

That very door now bars insurrectionist Trump.

Q.E.D. And may God have mercy on our wretched souls.

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Friday July 7, 2023

Culture

Frog and Toad Christendom

I wanted to suggest a few ideas that could anchor what we might jokingly refer to as “Frog and Toad Christendom.”

The idea is best summarized, as one friend helpfully put it, as resetting society’s defaults to favor people’s long-term interests rather than short-term pleasures. At present, we make it easy for people to indulge in in short-term pleasures that will, stretched out over time, leave them poorer, more lonely, and less able to contribute to their communities. We also make it harder to pursue things that will be in our best interests long-term. This is precisely the opposite of how it should be. We want to make it easier to choose virtue and harder to choose vices on a broad, societal level.

Here are six ideas that I think could fit under this overall principle:

First, ban online gambling …

Second, ban porn …

Third, place higher taxes on vices, such as marijuana and alcohol …

Fourth, redesign cities to discourage speeding and to make roads more pedestrian friendly. Third places thrive in walkable neighborhoods and because so much of our social connectedness comes via third places, we should want our cities to be walkable …

Fifth, birth should be free …

Sixth, to make it easier for workers, particularly workers with only high-school degrees, to form and support families, we should repeal right to work laws where they exist …

Jake Meador.

I agree with the spirit of all these, particularly when Jake fleshes them out (my ellipses). But they’re the work of a generation, and David Samuels’ “glittering oligarchy” (see The problem, and the un-solution below) will fight them as the existential threat they are.

What if …?

What if Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, had not died in his mid-teens?:

There would have been no Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the subsequent upheaval to the rhythm of rural English life. 90% of English art would not have been destroyed in an iconoclastic orgasm of ideological fervor, and English churches and shrines would have remained awash in color, rather than the stone or whitewashed sepulchers of today. There would have been no new aristocracy to steal the land of the peasants, and there would have been no Enclosures Act … There was no New England because there were no Puritans—no “City on a Hill,” no Protestant work ethic … The empire would have been English rather than British. The Industrial Revolution would have been muted, not being able to feed upon rural dispossession and poverty, and would consequently been less convulsive to English society.

Terry Cowan.

Since Terry’s an actual historian, he plays out a lot more detail than this. I, not a historian but made heartsick by Bradford Wicox’s Unintended Reformation, was reminded again that destroying culture and smashing artifacts was a Protestant thing before it was an ISIS thing.

Well played

(H/T Todd Grotenuis on micro.blog)

Must reading

When doctors fundamentally misunderstand the cause of a condition and treat the symptoms instead, and fail to properly monitor outcomes, and modify their practice in response to known adverse outcomes, our patients suffer — often greatly and for the rest of their lives — if indeed they survive. These fundamental errors underpin the depressingly regular scandals that punctuate the history of medicine. (The stakes are particularly high if surgery is involved.)

It is naïve to think that all these scandals are in the past … So where might the next medical scandal be brewing?

The increasing visibility of detransitioners suggests it may lie in wait in gender-affirming medicine. Many detransitioners are young women who underwent treatment for psychological distress that has left them with irreversible, life-long changes to their bodies: a deep voice, a beard, and compromised sexual function. Some have had their breasts surgically removed; some may be infertile. Others are young men who have been castrated.

…

For many detransitioners, the cause of their distress as a teenager was misattributed by their clinicians to the notion that they had been born in the wrong body, and that they would be helped by the surgical creation of the “correct” body ….

Sallie Baxendale

Mutilating bodies ought to be the very, very last resort for a problem that starts in the mind.

Ardently seeking catharsis

[I]ntroducing no-fault divorce was a travesty, and in many ways redefined marriage more drastically than Obergefell vs. Hodges. 

None of this is even on the radar of many of today’s conservative elites. As often as not, they have been through a divorce themselves, and the compromise that marks their personal lives renders them reticent about standing up for traditional marriage. The consequence has been that most conservative influencers seek to move on from same-sex marriage as quickly as possible. Battle lines have been redrawn, the tent broadened, and now—they loudly proclaim—we can get back to promoting the free market and taking on the really crazy leftist proposals. Sure, the institution of marriage might be an unfortunate piece of collateral damage in the fight, but at least we won’t give an inch on this transgender nonsense.

Clement J. Harrold

I, too, had never heard of Mr. Harrold. And I disagree with his vitriol toward the Respect for Marriage Act. But I’m glad someone had the balls to write something so contrary to the Zeitgeist that for a moment, I felt positively moderate.

The right kind of facts, mediated by our betters

In an important article titled “Google.gov,” the law professor Adam J. White writes that Google views “society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems” and aspires to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

Making ourselves stupid

A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. But we won’t submit because we’re Mur’cans.

Legalia

Protecting freedom of religion — through the speech clause

In case you hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, the free speech clause of the First Amendment has been more effective in protecting religiously-informed conscience than have free exercise or non-establishment clauses, directly concerned with religion though they be.

I cannot imagine a factual scenario where that would not continue to hold true, though that may be a failure of imagination (from too many years between me and a Socratic law school classroom).

Simple question, botched answer

The reliance of religious dissenters on the free speech clause should have come up here, too:

Another dissenter has “a simple question regarding 303 Creative”:

If the website designer’s action is expressive, and if her closely held religious belief was to believe that God was against interracial or inter-religious wedding, is it okay for her to refuse service? If not, why not? If so, it would seem to open a Pandora’s Box of truly held religious beliefs (with no way to prove/disprove) overriding any and all anti-discrimination protections if the business’s product is viewed as expressive — which is just as nebulous as knowing if a belief is truly held.

One answer is that all the major religions bar homosexual sex. A better case would be where a religion forbids divorce. Would someone refuse to design a site for a second wedding? Possibly, I suppose. I don’t doubt that some of this is driven by homophobia and very selective enforcement of Biblical strictures. As a Christian, I think it’s immoral to single out gays — and only gays — in this way. But a fundamentalist may differ, and they have rights too.

Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is a very smart fellow but he blew this one.

The simple answer to the dissenter’s simple question is “Yes, she may deny her expressive services to create custom websites for interracial or inter-religious weddings” in this fairly wild hypothetical, because this was a free speech case; all references to religious beliefs are beside the point because it’s not a free exercise of religion case.

Although I would find opposition to interracial weddings atavistic, offensive and anti-Christian, and opposition to inter-religious weddings surprising in this day and age, I believe that freedom from compelled expression is “high trump” and will be so held if challenges continue. The only viable question will be in edge cases: “is this really compelled expression”?

As I was writing the preceding, I remembered the days when I thought otherwise, thought that the gay tsunami would crush all before it — as its legal theorists intended:

In her symposium paper Moral Conflict: (Some) Religions and Marriage Equality, [Georgetown law prof and later Obama recess appointment to the EEOC Chai] Feldblum asked what effect “marriage equality” – i.e., marriage between members of the same sex – will have on the rights of those employers, landlords and others whose religion teaches them that same-sex sexual conduct is sinful (and perhaps harmful to society):

Let me be very clear … [I]n almost all the situations (not perhaps in every one, but in almost every one), I believe the burden on religious people that will be caused by granting gay people full equality will be justified …. That is because I believe granting liberty to gay people advances a compelling government interest, that such an interest cannot be adequately advanced if “pockets of resistance” to a societal statement of equality are permitted to flourish, and hence that a law that permits no individual exceptions based on religious beliefs will be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of liberty for gay people.

Are gay rights in conflict with religious freedom? – Tipsy Teetotaler ن. I don’t know what Feldblum would have said about those “others” whose (religious) convictions might motivate a free-speech refusal of expressive services, and I won’t speculate about that. But with that sole carve-out, Feldblum has been vindicated so far.

Racial gerrymandering in a SCOTUS dissent on affirmative action

I got a kick out of David Bernstein’s demolition of Justice Sotomayor’s judicial gerrymandering of “race” in last week’s Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases. Nobody is better qualified to dissect American bullshitting on the legalities of race than he is, and he has a book to prove it.

I may have enjoyed Freddie DeBoer’s Socratic dialog, putatively on affirmative action, even better: The Point of College, My Dear Glaucon

Saying the quiet part out loud

Leftists who love racial discrimination when they control it have responded widely and loudly. This tweet from Erica Marsh, a Democrat operative, provides an excellent summary of them all:

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

— Erica Marsh (@ericareport) June 29, 2023

Sven R. Larson, The America Report: Three Cheers for Conservatism (The European Conservative)

Twitter being Twitter, there was a nice pile-on, back-tracking, blacksplaining, etc.

(Do not rely on Mr. Larson for analysis of the Supreme Court cases he’s celebrating. He’s conservative, but he’s just as sloppy about the details as most liberals who are lamenting the same cases.)

SCOTUS

Be it noted that I disapprove the feeding frenzy of attacks on conservative Supreme Court justices, notably Thomas and Alito. I won’t go into the reasons why, which have been well-addressed by their defenders or, in Alito’s case, by himself.

But I can still appreciate the wordcraft of these bits via Frank Bruni:

  • In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity from billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed: “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted.”
  • In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”

Politics

$35 million per quarter

Trump raking it in: The Prince of Mar-a-Lago pulled in $35 million in the second quarter of the year, double what he raised the quarter before. It looks like Republican donors not only weren’t put off by the classified document scandal. . . or the New York indictment. . . or the Georgia case, but are, in fact, rallying behind him, perhaps hoping to get a better seat at the document viewing table. If you had to guess, how much would you need to donate to see the aliens? Just images of aliens, printed and spread out next to a Diet Coke and onion rings, preferably. Asking for a friend.

Nellie Bowles

Orange Man bad

I was taken by surprised at least twice by this quote from Peggy Noonan:

Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

Imagine that! Knowingly forfeiting the Presidency for this evil man. But I think Noonan’s right, as she so often is.

The problem, and the un-solution

The country once defined by its powerful middle class is now a flagship of inequality that looks more like a high-end version of Brazil or Nigeria than the mid-20th century bastion of strong unions, churches, civic associations and inclusive political parties … A glittering oligarchy … presides over a simmering landscape of uncontrolled low-skill immigration, drug addiction and dead-end service jobs.

… Propelled by the rise of identity politics, the fragmenting logic of market capitalism or the force of new technologies that reconfigure space and time — or all three forces working hand-in-hand — America has become the prize for a set of tribes engaged in a zero-sum contest for power and spoils.

…

Where the idea of an American nation or community is increasingly rejected as a remnant of a hegemonic and oppressive past, the celebration of particularity reigns. There is the mandatory replacement of the American flag by sectarian banners — the Black Lives Matter flag for Black History Month; the ever-changing LGBTQA+ symbols for Pride Month — along with elaborate ceremonies of printing new postage stamps, and rewriting history books to focus on the laudable achievements of tribal heroes …

The paradoxical nature of the current American predicament is therefore hard to miss. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has cemented America’s place as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, the unchallenged global leader in fields like AI and biotech — capable of disintegrating any would-be rival by pushing a button and detaching them from the global banking system and the internet. On the other, the digital revolution propelled by American technology and finance is visibly disintegrating America itself. The meritocratic universities and other institutions that once made America the envy of the world are hostages of a new political system in which rote repetition of Democratic Party catechisms about race, class, gender and identity has replaced institutional values such as intellectual independence and critical inquiry. Such ambitions, along with the pursuit of beauty and other forms of excellence, are now signs of Right-wing heresy, to be stamped out by party administrators who administer, well, pretty much everything.

The Democratic Party plays a central role in the new American order, serving as a kind of shadow state, or state-within-a-state — the supremacy of the former being characteristic of so-called revolutionary regimes overseas. Once a vehicle for working Americans to achieve tangible goals such as home ownership, decent healthcare, national parks and a dignified old age, the Democrats under the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama found a new place in the sun as the address to which the oligarchs pay protection money and do deals with the security agencies in Washington — after endorsing a global trade regime that cost millions of Americans their jobs and flooded their towns with fentanyl.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, once the party of America’s richest moneymen and biggest industrialists, now poses as the party of small business and the dispossessed, under the leadership of an oft-indicted figure who surrounds himself with the dregs of American political life. Whatever threat Donald Trump once posed to the robber barons and the bureaucracies they have allied themselves with, he long ago revealed himself to be a clownish figure, alternating populist rhetoric with self-pitying conspiracy theories while repeatedly failing to protect himself or his followers from forces that mean them harm. The result has been political suicide for Republicans who support him, as well as those who oppose them.

David Samuels, The Puritan spirit of America’s civil war

See? I think I understand discontent with the way things have developed under the major parties. But nominating that evil man is not a solution.

247 and counting

Politics

Trump

Lies and lies

All politicians lie, I dutifully concede, but there are lies and there are lies. [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy’s claim that the second impeachment was rash and ill-considered after Trump had spent two months trying to orchestrate a coup in plain sight, hour by hour on TV and Twitter, is a lie. Granted, it’s a common lie among Republicans who lacked the courage to vote for impeachment and then hid behind a flimsy procedural excuse, the same way Senate Republicans did in declining to convict Trump because his term as president had already run out. But it’s a lie nonetheless.

Nick Cattogio

Grifts

The other grift that’s really bothering me right now is Trump taking money from middle-class Americans who think they’re supporting his campaign for president and then he’s using it, as a billionaire, to pay his own lawyers. It’s disgusting. But this is Donald. As I said, he’s the cheapest SOB I’ve ever met in my life. He’s just better at spending other people’s money than he is at spending his own. Frankly, this is why he went bankrupt three different times in New Jersey in the casino business. He would borrow other people’s money, run through it, and then not pay it back. In this instance, he’s taking money from middle-class people who are working hard and sending him $25, $50, $100 multiple times a year through his website. And then he has the audacity, while he’s sitting on billions of dollars of his own personal wealth, to not use that personal wealth to pay his personal legal fees. Instead, he uses the money of middle-class Americans to pay it off. That’s a grift.

Chris Christie

Some countries work differently

Brazil’s top electoral court banned Jair Bolsonaro, a former president, from holding public office until 2030. The court found that Mr Bolsonaro abused his powers by casting doubt over the trustworthiness of Brazil’s electronic voting machines and implying that the 2022 election was rigged . He lost his bid for re-election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing rival.

The Economist World in Brief for July 1. No doubt many wish the U.S. had an equivalent procedure.

Oafs

I suggested in 2020 that “it’s a class thing.” A certain kind of oafishness is considered lovable by the political classes, and not even recognized as oafish because it is their sort of oafishness. Another kind of oafishness is considered lovable by those whom they disdain. Obama was a smooth rich fellow who flattered the elites. Biden is a coarse rich fellow who sneers at the common people in the same breath as he boasts of his humble origins. The elites think this kind of talk is merely telling it like it is.

Trump is a coarse rich fellow who flatters the common people. Since he sneers at the elites and adopts a popular tone in doing so, it enrages them.

J Budziszewski, Elites, Deplorables, and Political Style

I find Budziszewski worth reading even when I disagree, as I did with most of this column. This excerpt may be onto something. It’s hard for me to judge because I bear many marks of being among the elites but also countersigns that I’m closer to the common people.

Cultural

Renaissance men (and women)

Excited to read this: Beauty Makes a Comeback. You see, I’ve got this 15-year-old grandson, and neither he nor anyone else has quite figured out who he is yet. American College of the Building Arts seems like a via media; I’d feel pretty good about it.

Dietary dogma

Not a single one of those promoting the “three meals a day,” “eat in moderation” idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Unseemly Modesty

“Kyle from Chicago,” visiting Nashville for the NHL Draft last night, was stopped on the street this week by the crew from The Penalty Box podcast for a man-on-the-street interview about hockey and the Chicago Blackhawks’ pick of once-in-a-generation talent, Connor Bedard, as the number one overall selection. “On a scale of one to ten, how much would you say you know about hockey?” He responded: “I didn’t play professionally or anything, so probably like a four?” He was being…modest. Unbeknownst to the interviewer, “Kyle from Chicago” was Blackhawks General Manager, Kyle Davidson. Well played.

TMD

Bracing:

Affirmative Action Thoughts in an Inelegant List Format. It’s Freddie, and defies summary.

Feminisms

[The] women’s movement, from the outset, was marked by a tension between what Harrington calls a “feminism of care,” which resisted the logic of the market, emphasizing interdependence and the domestic realm, and a “feminism of freedom,” which “embraced the individualist market logic, and sought women’s entry into that market on the same terms as men.” The movement, Harrington contends, was more or less balanced in an “ambivalent tension” until the mid-twentieth century, when feminism’s embrace of contraception and abortion tipped the movement decidedly toward the market. From this point on, “feminism largely abandoned the question of how men and women can best live together, and instead embraced a tech-enabled drive to liberate humans altogether from the confines of biology.”

Abigail Favale, A Feminism Embedded in Human Nature, discussing Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress.

Legal

Freedom from compelled speech

I assume my readers all know at least vaguely about the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative, but here’s something about it that’s under-reported and even mis-reported:

This case was not, as it has been widely described, about whether a website designer could refuse gay customers. … Indeed, the parties stipulated that the web designer, Lorie Smith, was “‘willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation and gender,’ and she ‘will gladly create custom graphics and websites’ for clients of any sexual orientation.” She was simply not willing to design websites that contained messages that violated her religious beliefs.

The case was not about whether a business could refuse to provide goods or services but whether it could refuse to generate specific expressions with which it disagreed …

The 303 Creative case was … about compelled speech. When could the government require a commercial provider of expressive services to say things she found objectionable? Could the government compel a portrait artist to paint a heroic picture of a white supremacist? Could the government compel a speechwriter to pen an anti-gay screed on behalf of a right-wing politician?

Under traditional First Amendment doctrine, the answer was a clear and emphatic no. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect my right to say things I believe, it also protects my right not to say things I don’t believe.

David French, How Christians and Drag Queens Are Defending the First Amendment.

In a very important sense, this was not even a case about homosexuality or same-sex marriage. A retired lawyer and longtime advocate for religious freedom and free speech, I downloaded and highlighted the court’s decision. But when it came to tagging it for ease of subsequent retrieval, my tags were #discrimination, #free_speech, #compelled_expression, #websites, #weddings, and #public_accommodations — and I only tagged “weddings” in case I was lazily focusing on peripheral issues. I did not tag “free_exercise” because this was a free speech case. Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, seems to get this part right:

[W]hile Smith asserted religion as her motivation, this is a speech case, so it won’t matter whether business owners are motivated to discriminate by sincere religious values, secular bigotry or no reason at all.

(italics added)

The core was freedom from compelled expression (speech in constitutional terms), whether that expression be celebration of a faux wedding (from the website designer’s perspective) or biting atheist advocacy or anything else she did not want to express.

As Dale Carpenter, a constitutional scholar at SMU put it:

I read [the majority in 303 Creative] to say we’re not stripping any protection from classes of people or people based on status. We are protecting expressive activity, regardless of protected and class status.”

“The court here was talking about basically a commission-based service that is customized and expressive,” Carpenter adds. “That’s a really narrow range.”

Quoted in TMD

Student Loan forgiveness

As we’ve previously reported, research suggests blanket partial forgiveness would disproportionately benefit wealthy and upwardly mobile graduates over low-income, debt-burdened borrowers. An analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found the richest 20 percent of households hold about a third of all student debt, compared to 8 percent held by the poorest 20 percent. Meanwhile, it’s possible a debt forgiveness precedent would incentivize students to take on more debt, allowing colleges to raise prices further. According to a DataStream analysis of Labor Department data, the cost of a college education has increased by 1,200 percent since 1980, compared to overall inflation of 236 percent.

TMD

These facts are probably what ticked off red states: student loan forgiveness was a payoff to a demographic already inclined to vote blue.

But they are not sufficient to warrant striking down the loan forgiveness. I don’t disagree with the Supreme Court majority that Biden lacked the power to forgive student loans en masse under the HEROES Act based on the “emergency” of Covid. Biden has promised to try again under other law.

Here’s what does trouble me about the Supreme Court decision: Did Missouri really have standing to bring the challenge? I do not like lawless government actions that try to evade court review, as the loan forgiveness was immediately understood to do because of standing issues. Similarly, I include the now-mostly-forgotten Texas abortion law of a very few year ago that defied pre-enforcement challenge by creating uncertainty about who to sue in such a challenge.

There ought be a law

Fake reviews might soon be illegal: “The Federal Trade Commission on Friday proposed new rules to take aim at businesses that buy, sell and manipulate online reviews. If the rules are approved, they’ll carry a big stick: a fine of up to $50,000 for each fake review, for each time a consumer sees it.”

Prufrock

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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