Category: AI (really, just pattern engines)

Thursday, 12/18/25

Quietly grassing up the neighbor

Of the Bondi Beach terrorist shootings by Muslim men Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram (unconfirmed by police at this writing) and the heroic intervention of one Ahmed al-Ahmed:

Let it be said, and said with firmness and gratitude, that a Muslim fruit seller named Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed one of the gunmen and disarmed him, saving Jewish lives and taking a couple of bullets himself for his trouble. May God bless that brave man. Here is video of him courageously tackling the gunman. This brings to mind something I was told back in 2002 by a Jewish friend who worked in counterterrorism. Be careful not to accuse every Muslim, she said. Some of our best sources are Muslims within Muslim communities who hate what they’re seeing, but know that if they speak out publicly against it, they will be killed. So they come to us quietly.

Rod Dreher

I wish we could figure out what makes many Muslims exemplary citizens, others murderous fanatics. Though I reject Islam as a false religion, I don’t want to think it’s simply that the former don’t take it seriously.

I have a theory, but it’s at a high enough level of generality that it’s not much use, I fear: that Islam, like Evangelicalism, has no authority beyond a sacred text, so Imams/Preachers can twist the text as they wish, limited only by what their congregants will tolerate.

The Other Terrorists

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded after examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Nicholas Kristof, The Lawbreakers Trump Loves (August 29, 2020)

AI moves fast, breaks things

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch

Grievance Memoirs

Political memoirs tend to fall into recognizable categories.

There is the sanitized precampaign memoir, gauzy life stories mixed with vague policy projects and odes to American goodness. There is the postcampaign memoir, usually by the losers, assessing the strategy and sifting through the wreckage. There are memoirs by up and comers who dream of joining the arena and by aging politicos rewriting their careers once more before the obits start to land. There are memoirs by former staff members who realize that proximity to power gives them a good story and memoirs by journalists who chronicle power so closely that they imagine themselves its protagonists.

But a recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir. In their books, Eric Trump (“Under Siege”), Karine Jean-Pierre (“Independent”) and Olivia Nuzzi (“American Canto”) are all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies, obsessed with “the narrative” over the facts and oblivious to their complicity in the conditions they decry.

The authors (a third child embracing on to his father’s legal and political grudges, a former White House press secretary groping for a new brand, a boutique political journalist enmeshed in a self-made scandal) are animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces. They are ancillary characters inflating themselves into victims, heroes, even symbols. It is the inevitable memoir style for a moment when everyone feels resentful, oppressed, overlooked — in a word, aggrieved.

Carlos Lozado (who’s famous among his New York Times colleagues as a voracious book-reader).

Add to Lozado’s list a longish article by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine, which Rod Dreher found “one of the most powerful essays I’ve read all year.” Its gist seems to be that straight, white, young men can’t catch a break any more – for reasons predating AI.

Ross Douthat thinks Savage has a point; that Douthat has an opinion suggests that Dreher isn’t just playing Chicken Little again.

I’m fortunate to be chronologically beyond gathering personal straight white male grievance anecdotes (and that my grandson is thrilled at, not resigned to, the prospect of a sort of Shop Class As Soulcraft career).

Are we the baddies?

Remizov and other conservative democrats complain that modern Western liberalism is in fact anti-democratic, as it tramples on national traditions and subordinates national authorities to international ones and to the impersonal forces of globalization.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism. This book is pretty good at giving the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

When your only tool is anger, every little problem looks infuriating

Trump has never shined in moments that call for dignity and restraint … This is what makes Trump’s post about the Reiners not just despicable and cruel but also bad for the country. In moments of national mourning or trauma, a president can seek to bring people together … But not Trump. He finds the most divisive way to insert himself … His choices … take moments that could be unifying—surely Americans of all political views can agree on the greatness of When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride—and turn them into opportunities for anger.

Which is, in effect, Trump’s political project.

David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder

Shorts

  • I like ebooks because nobody can tell that I’m performative reading. (@restlesslens on micro.blog)
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. (Gustave Flaubert)
  • Insofar is not the same as inasmuch, and I don’t know why the current style is to break the former into three words.
  • I remember mocking people for thinking the Covid vaccine was Bill Gates’ way of getting microchips into us. Hmmm.
  • This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal. (Peggy Noonan, Trump may be losing his touch)
  • If “TDS” is the tendency to become irrationally obsessed with Donald Trump and project that obsession onto everyone else, then somebody is indeed deranged, and it wasn’t Rob Reiner. (David Graham, Trump Blames Rob Reiner for His Own Murder.
  • A tool always implies at least one small story[:] There is a situation; something needs doing. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • After this awful weekend, Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president. (The Free Press, Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. (Advice given to incoming women at Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Thursday, 10/30/25, politics-free

Radical autonomy is a delusion

In partial response Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” just published by Lisa Siraganian in Academe, a healthy dose of realism versus sanctimony:

As for insisting on your right to complete self-governance, free from “secondary, external aims,” as Siraganian puts it … well, if you expect someone else to pay you to pursue truth, at some point, you must accept some secondary, external aims.

Academics tend to recoil from such a crass and mercenary idea, and fair enough, but the world is a crass and mercenary place. We talk about pursuing truth for its own sake, but most academics are pursuing it in exchange for money they can use to satisfy their many less elevated needs. The people who provide that money want something in return. Many will not be content to know that somewhere the global stock of Truth is increasing. Especially if one of the Truths you insist on is that they are dim-witted bigots.

Megan McArdle

Not victimless

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an announcement. “In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” he wrote on X.

…  

It is odd to treat adult spaces as though the marker of maturity is simply abundant pornography. In response to Altman’s post, one user asked: “Why do age-gates always have to lead to erotica? Like, I just want to be able to be treated like an adult and not a toddler, that doesn’t mean I want perv-mode activated.” Altman ducked the question, replying simply, “You won’t get it unless you ask for it.” 

But the cultural impact of increasingly violent pornography makes it obvious he is wrong. Women who have never watched pornography will still meet men in their dating pool who are disgusted by pubic hair, since those men’s appetites have been formed to desire pre-pubescent-appearing women. Women will meet men who assume women commonly enjoy anal sex. And increasingly, women meet men who assume choking is a natural part of sex.

Leah Libresco Sargeant, You Can’t Opt Out of Sam Altman’s Erotica.

(And seemingly everybody takes for granted that “dating” means some kind of sex, notes Tipsy.)

Incorrigibly ignorant

All those nice scientists from 1970 to 2000 sitting in their Presbyterian and Lutheran church pews on Sunday telling the world that feeding dead cows to cows was a wonderful way to feed everyone because their parts-and-pieces worldview said so. Eventually, they were jolted out of their self-assured righteousness when mad cow raised its ugly head. But they didn’t repent in sackcloth and ashes, like they should have. Oh no, they went about their Western thought processes with nary a break in stride.

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal

USSR and Russia

Epilogue

The USSR is not quite dead in Russia. It has just shrunk to the size of Russia proper.
VITALY TRETYAKOV, July 1992

Not a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed.
BORIS YELTSIN

An unreformed Russia will not have the strength for empire. A reformed Russia will not have the will.
JACK F. MATLOCK, JR., 1995

Jack F. Matlock , Autopsy on an Empire

Snippet

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.

Simone Weil, Love in the Void

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

New, chill Tipsy

Rules, Codes

The modern sexual marketplace

Half a century on from the contraceptive technology transition, and Greer’s call for women to emancipate desire from family formation, some 40 percent of Americans now meet their partners via the frictionless, boundary-less, disembodied free-for-all of online dating. And what this delivered wasn’t the blossoming of sexuality Firestone imagined: it was the modern ‘sexual marketplace’. In this ‘marketplace’, age-old sexed asymmetries have returned in cartoon form – without social codes to govern their action.

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Weird, democratic, recognizable rules

Of HBO’s series The Gilded Age:

I think we like its picture of a society that had brute but recognizable rules that, in some weird way, were democratic. Make a whole pot of money, be generous with it to gain notice but enact modesty when thanked, learn to imitate personal dignity and a little refinement, and you’re in. It wasn’t much tighter than that. Now it’s more just the money, no one has to bow to some phony old value system, and the money spurts in all directions, creating a themeless chaos, and tech billionaires in sweatshirts give us moral lectures from Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.

Peggy Noonan

How are things holding up?

Can anything good come out of DOGE?!

My provisional verdict on the Trump administration is written and published and I do not intend to dwell on it anymore. But when DOGE started on its rampage, I wondered if the lads might, incidentally, do some good with their techie tools.

It appears that they have, and the tool was an AI thingamajig called SweetREX Deregulation AI. Who can object in principle to identifying regulations that are not required by statute and to flagging them for possible repeal? I cannot.

Hey, Mussolini reportedly made the trains run on time.

The judicial system still stands

I’m happy to say that the judicial system is serving as a fairly effective check on some of Trump’s worst impulses. And I say this, despite the sloppy narrative in the progressive press that the Supreme Court has become a rubberstamp for Trump. (One suspects that they’ve been written for months, just waiting for a few “statistics” to plug in before running them.)

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith methodically demolishes much of the nonsense channeled from Adam Bonica through Thomas Edsall at the New York Times. Goldsmith’s is a substack and likely is paywalled.

Suffice for now that the most dramatic claim, which involves federal District Court ruling against Trump more than 93% of the time and the Supreme Court upholding Trump more than 93% of the time is really preposterous. Goldsmith:

This analysis points the most fundamental problem with Bonica’s efforts to draw inferences from the Court’s Trump-related interim orders. The Court reviews only applications filed by parties. The Solicitor General seeks interim relief when he thinks the chances of success are relatively high. As Steve Vladeck explained in June, there are “literally dozens of adverse rulings by district courts that the Trump administration has been willing to leave intact—either by not appealing them in the first place, or by not pushing further after being rejected by courts of appeals.” (By my count that number is around four dozen right now.)==

… When Bonica says that the Supreme Court “reverses almost automatically,” he is ignoring the crucial fact that the Court sees only a fraction of lower court rulings, and then only ones that are skewed for likely government success.

Bonica and the New York Times are committing a variant of the political science sin of “testing on the dependent variable”: they draw sweeping conclusions from a subset of cases that is small, highly unrepresentative, and unexplained. Other critical claims in the Edsall piece ignore this fundamental point.

Goldsmith (bold added)

Jonathan Adler’s subsequent comments on Edsall and Goldsmith are not paywalled. Adler largely agrees with Goldsmith.

My point is not that Trump is exactly “right” about anything. It’s more that some of the wrongness is not illegal or unconstitutional.

Ailments and symptoms

[R]esistance is treating the symptom, not the ailment. The ailment is the tide of global populism that has been rising across the developed world for years, if not decades. And the cause is that our societies have segregated into caste systems, in which almost all the opportunity, respect and power is concentrated within the educated caste and a large portion of the working class understandably wants to burn it all down.

David Brooks, America’s New Segregation (gift link)

Authority

Following

Let’s begin by considering the sentence “We must follow the science.” It is one we have heard, in various forms, repeatedly since about the middle of March 2020 via the various propaganda platforms that saturate our lives: the electronic billboards, the websites, the TV ads, the Tweets and Instagram posts. No sentence better captures the core convictions and commitments of our well-educated, well-heeled, and well-regarded.

Think of the parallel commands never heard. No one who is today in a position of cultural authority ever says, “We must follow our guts.” No one says, “We must follow tradition.” No one says, “We must follow our religious leaders.” No one says, “We must follow the poets.” No one says, “We must follow what the majority decides.” No one says, “We must follow those who have displayed wisdom.”

Importantly, no one in a position of cultural authority even says, “We must follow no one but ourselves. No one can legitimately set limits on our behavior!”

No, the widely held, seemingly unchallengeable cultural belief is: We must follow the science.

Jeremy Beer, Limits, Risk Aversion, and Technocracy

Xenogender: just one question, but it’s kind of tough

If you read the UNESCO documents on childhood sexuality education …, you will find pages and pages about protecting children from sexual abuse.  Sprinkled through them are much briefer passages which let the cat out of the bag — but you have to look for them.  It’s true that the activists who run these agencies don’t want children to be raped.  But they do want to sexualize them, and they want it very much.

They explain that “comprehensive sexuality education” “equips” young people including children to develop sexual relationships.  Among its many goals are that five-to-eight year olds are to be taught that they can masturbate and it will give them pleasure; nine-to-twelve year olds, that abortion is safe; and twelve-to-fifteen year olds, that there are various and sundry “gender identities” which deserve equal respect.

Speaking of so called gender identities:  The UNESCO documents don’t list them, but did you know that activists now claim that some people are “xenogender”?  That’s a gender “that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender.”

I wonder:  If it can’t be contained by human understandings of gender, then how do the activists know that it is one?

J Budziszewski (bold added)

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

Monday, 8/11/25

The New, Improved, Bureau of Labor Statistics

I’m not naive enough to think there exists such a thing as a non-ideological, neutral economic statistics human. So the idea that they would goose numbers to hurt Trump isn’t crazy to me, at all. But we do know that a Trump sycophant replacement will push this to new heights. We all know they’ll be technically worse. Numbers will be displayed to produce the letters M-A-G-A. The unemployed will be renamed New Golfers, as in, “The number of New Golfers this quarter is soaring.” Inflation? Rebranded as Patriot Growth. Rising gas prices? That’s Freedom Fuel demanding a premium. The only percentage allowed under the new jobs guy is 100 percent. A market crash is finally, a buying opportunity for American citizens, you are welcome. By Q3, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will be headquartered inside a Bass Pro Shop. Every press conference from the new Fed Chair will begin with, “Now I’m no expert, but. . . ” Jobs numbers are whatever you want them to be. Job numbers are a feeling.

Nellie Bowles

All she needs is a few more randomly-capitalized words and bangs to have the Trumpian rhetorical style down pat.

Power for power’s sake because … power

Megan McArdle from the Washington Post is a frequent guest on the Dispatch podcast. Recently, she helped unpack how people have seen elite hypocrisy and drawn the conclusion that there are no real norms, no truth, and have thereby greenlighted Trump who nowadays abandons all pretext of virtue, all gestures at norm-keeping. For instance, he doesn’t want redistricting in Texas because of apple pie, motherhood, the flag, and cute little furry things, but because “we’re entitled to five more seats in Congress.”

The relevant YouTube discussion starts here. My favorite, fructifying observation was about the “complete liberal takeover of the institutions that were in charge of deeming which hypocritical arguments counted.”

Enjoy.

The ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy

Andrew Sullivan was on fire Friday. He notes that Trump is “psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.” More on that at the end.

Meanwhile, the more granular indictment:

  • “what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.”
  • On the “emergency” he inherited from Biden: “A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out.”
  • “Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.”
  • “only in police states do governments deploy masked anonymous armed men — now with no age limits! — patrolling the streets with the power to arrest and detain.”

Summing up:

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in. I have a lot of sins to repent of in my life, but even once voting for Donald Trump isn’t among of them. If you voted for him because you hated the left more, you may need to take stock.

Donald Trump is Allan Brooks

How exciting! I came up with this metaphor on my own!: “Donald Trump is Allan Brooks. His cabinet, department heads and other lackeys are his ChatGPT.”

You didn’t “have to be there,” but you do need to know that Allan Brooks is a guy who ChatGPT led to the brink of insanity by playing sycophant to his increasingly delusional ideas over something like 300 hours of chat (chronicled in the story at the hyperlink).

Redistricting

I haven’t written a great deal about the effort of Texas Republicans to redistrict their state in the middle of a decade (that is, without any new formal census data for justification). In case you have been living in a cave, the Republicans are hoping to tease five more Republican district out of Texas, which would virtually assure Republican control of Congress after the 2026 congressional elections.

I admit that my impression was that this was completely abnormal and probably there was some constitutional provision that tied congressional redistricting to the decennial censuses so as to make it unconstitutional. I have now gone looking for that provision, having more than a passing acquaintance with the constitution, and I don’t see any such provision within the amount of time I was willing to spend looking for it.

Republicans in Texas have so often flaunted disregard for decency, truthfulness, and norms in general, that not being a Texas resident, I’m going to try to bite my tongue on this latest round of norm-breaking.

But now our shape-shifting Vice President has visited Indiana, reportedly urging us to redistrict before the 2026 elections as well. I’m pleased to report that the idea got a surprisingly cool reception from our Governor, which I ardently hope will continue.

I find consolation, contemplating these norm-breakers, in the thought that the way you get more “red” congressional districts by legislative fiat is by spreading the state’s Republicans over more districts, decreasing the margin in each district. If the US remains negative on Trump in November, 2026, the redrawn districts are likelier to swing Democrat than if they had fewer red districts with fatter margins.

I say that not because I want Democrats to win, but because I want Trumpists to lose. And Donald J. Trump has a pretty solid record of fouling up the electoral chances of Republicans downticket and in off-years (can you say “Herschel Walker”?).

Man bites dog

A retired lawyer, I subscribe to the “Short Circuits” blog which gives, um, short accounts of cases in federal circuit courts. For instance:

Boyle County, Ky. sheriff’s deputy is sentenced to over nine years for using excessive force on arrestees and lying to cover it up. DOJ (2024): When we looked at his phone, we found that he likes to brag about beating people up and take photos of injuries he caused to share with buddies. Sixth Circuit (unpublished): Conviction affirmed.

By the way: criminal prosecution of rogue police is too rare. I suspect there was a racial element in the excessive force; else the United States Department of Justice wouldn’t get involved in a Kentucky police matter.

Another example of the blog’s terseness:

Las Vegas firefighter sues the city for sex- and race-based discrimination. The case goes to a jury, which finds (1) that the firefighter was treated offensively, but not because of her race or sex, and (2) that the firefighter was not retaliated against for reporting the offensive incident. Despite finding no basis for liability, the jury awards the firefighter $150k in damages. District Court: Okay jurors, I just want to clarify that you’re all agreed there was no retaliation or race-/sex-based discrimination. Jurors: That’s correct. District Court: Judgment for the city, no damages. Ninth Circuit: Sounds about right.

Terser still:

Tenth Circuit: We held off on deciding this case about gender-transition procedures for minors until the Supreme Court decided Skrmetti. And, well, the Supreme Court decided Skrmetti.

For Love of Sentences

Frank Bruni includes this observation in this week’s column:

  • In The New Republic, Virginia Heffernan observed that the prevalence of women in Trump’s cabinet wasn’t a blessing, given the women: “Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie.” (Amy S. Parker, Evanston, Ill., and Maureen J. O’Connor, Sacramento, Calif.)

The rest of his choices are non-political and can begin a closing palate-cleanser:

  • In The Washington Post, David Von Drehle paid tribute to the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last month: “A mathematical prodigy from a wealthy family with a fondness for the light comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehrer was to social criticism what Cole Porter was to sex — proof there is no better way to say the unsayable than with witty rhymes and toe-tapping rhythms.” (Uschi Wallisser, Stuttgart, Germany)
  • And George F. Will bemoaned the ubiquity and vagueness of a four-letter word: “Having no fixed meaning, ‘vibe’ cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase ‘social justice,’ which includes a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun.” Will added: “Shakespeare used 28,827 different words without resorting to ‘vibe.’ He could have written that Lear gave off a bad vibe while raging on the heath, and that Falstaff’s vibe was fun. But the Bard did as well as he could with the limited resources of the Elizabethan English he had.” (Cheryl Hanschen, Jackson, Mo., and Grace Sheldon-Williams, Los Angeles, among others)

Frank Bruni’s For Love of Sentences. He had several more good ones, but I thought I’d be skirting copyright laws if I quoted all of them.

Bruni’s Love of Sentences follows his main weekly opinion piece, which this week pointed out that Sydney Sweeney is a remarkably good actress — a scene-stealer from bigger names, even.

Given Bruni’s examples, I may never be able to confirm this for myself, despite the lass being easy on the eyes, because the characters he describes her portraying are exactly the nasty or disturbed sorts I’ll turn off if I stumble onto them, and won’t begin watching if forewarned.

Things AI taught me this week

Did you know that the word “blueberry” included the letter “b” three times? Neither did I, but ChatGPT 5 is on top of it.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

And now for something more edifying

Having vented all my political bile a few hours ago, I give you, as David French puts it at the end of a column, “what else I did.”

Not “what” but “whether”

[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.

…

If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.

Adam Smith in Christian Scholars Review.

Shedding Enlightenment Values

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

David A. Bell, A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values.

Speaking of AI, it seems that the new ChatGPT 5 adds to its error-proneness a new feature: incorrigibility. It no longer flatters and apologizes for errors and corrects them — at least, not consistently.

To update an old aphorism, any lawyer who relies on AI has a client who has a fool for a lawyer.

Judeo-Christian anthropology

I’ve learned a lot from reading some serious religious thinkers down through the years: Augustine, Pascal, Franz Rosenzweig, Reinhold Niebuhr, TS Eliot, Walker Percy, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Lawler, Alan Jacobs, David Bentley Hart …

The thing I most appreciate about the authors I’ve listed is how they expand my understanding of human nature. Judeo-Christian anthropology really does have a different shape than ancient Greek philosophical accounts of it, no less than modern scientific-reductionistic construals.

Damon Linker, Ask Me Anything

More:

The country is more secular than it was 20 years ago; the Republican coalition is more secular than it was then, too; and the parts of that coalition that describe themselves as evangelicals are, on average, less likely to attend church and read the Bible regularly than their counterparts a generation ago. Their faith has evolved into an identity marker: They call themselves Christians or evangelicals because those labels convey that they’re the good Americans, as opposed to those bad Americans on the other side of the partisan and culture-war divide.

We’re Babylon

I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. … Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.

Rod Dreher.

The idea that America is “Babylon” has intrigued me for more than 50 years, after I first read Edward Tracy’s book The United States in Prophecy.

I do not recommend that book, written as it was by some manner of Evangelical or Dispensationalist. But I bought it at a time when I was Evangelical and the Evangelical Book market was flooded with crap like The Late, Great Planet Earth, which fed Evangelicals Americanism and cold war Russophobia (which differed from today’s Russophobia). The idea that the United States might be an equivocal, or even a negative, player in Bible prophecy was just irresistibly transgressive to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the irony of using Hal Lindseyish exegesis to reach Jim Wallisish conclusions.

Still, the possibility of Tracy being at least adjacent to the truth lingered and lingers, partly because I have a much different view of Bible prophecy these days. I don’t use it to predict the future (I never really did), but I think that figures like “Babylon” can echo typologically down through the ages. In that sense “We’re Babylon” fits Edward Tracy’s exegesis awfully well (see Jeremiah 51:7-8, Revelation 14:8).

Note that “the United States as Babylon” in the constellation of my thinking antedates Trumpism by four decades or more. This is one thing I don’t blame on our current President. Indeed, events of the last 7 months or so have so debased us that it’s hard to imagine the world uniformly mourning if our instantiation of Babylon fell.

Erotica

Much later, Playboy magazine came along, in which girls removed their underwear and a boy could drive to a drugstore in a part of town where he was not known and tuck a copy into a Wall Street Journal and peruse it And later came Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint and now porn is freely available online though to me it has all the erotic allure of watching oil well pumps pumping in North Dakota.

Garrison Keillor

Gerrymander boomerang

Those who draw gerrymanders can get too greedy. They maximize seats by cutting their party’s margins in each seat. If 2026 is a particularly bad year for Republicans in Texas, they could lose ground from this gerrymander.

E.J. Dionne.

From your mouth to God’s ear, E.J.

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

Tuesday Tasties, 8/5/25

Do better, Republicans

I try not to overdo on politics, but I consider my first two items today tacit moral admonitions. I don’t even think that their factual predicates are open to honest dispute.

Vibes all the way down

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official
Economists said ousting the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics could undermine confidence in government economic data.

New York Times

As Trump testified once in court

My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings … Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.

Some data, such as the number of votes he received at the polls in 2020, initially refused to budge. But with a little bit of threatening from some extra-patriotic patriots, the election turned out to have been a Trump blowout. Just ask any elected Republican; they’ll tell you!

…

Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

That’s a good thing …

Alexandra Petri

Comprehensively failing the Solzhenitsyn test

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

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election.

Eliot A. Cohen

I’ve wondered how Republicans lost their balls. Apparently Putin got them and added them to his own:

Trump Has Soured on Putin. Putin Couldn’t Care Less.

Culture more broadly

Not “what” but “whether”

[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.

…

If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.

Adam Smith in Christian Scholars Review.

Shedding Enlightenment Values

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

David A. Bell, A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Saturday, 7/12/25

Miscellany

Intellectual honesty got in the way

Over the weekend, I listened to the six episodes of The Protocol, the new NYT podcast on child sex changes. It’s very helpful to get a chronology of the ideologically-motivated shifts in policy and treatments, and to hear a range of views, pro and con. It was also obvious that the two reporters were super-liberal, and desperately wanted to confirm the benefits of child transition – but intellectual honesty got in the way, as it must. This is a more balanced treatment than anything you will find in, say, the Washington Post.

Well worth a listen.

I was struck by a few things. Both Bowers and Kennedy – trans activists and surgeons – still eagerly deploy the trope that transition is necessary to stop children from killing themselves. They know this isn’t true at this point, and the NYT did not provide the data that shows that trans youth suicide is extremely rare (2 cases among kids denied a sex change out of 1500 in the UK over ten years, for example). That anyone would still be telling parents confronting a kid with acute gender dysphoria that their only choice is between a “live boy” or a “dead girl” is appalling, unethical and untrue. yet the leading trans activists know it’s their best line, and are happy to keep lying if it will help keep them transing children.

Bowers denies that there is any debate to be had at all – “there are not two sides” – and denigrates Hillary Cass as “haughty” and “old,” without addressing her findings. Kennedy argues that child sex changes came about at first so that black trans women would be less vulnerable to being murdered because they would pass better. (I’d suspect the opposite: that passing better as female at first makes the subsequent revelation that they are still biological men that more dangerous.) But the data we actually have suggests that black transwomen have a lower chance of being murdered than an average citizen.

Then there was the refusal of the trans activists even to acknowledge the profound differences between adults and minors. You get the sense that these older trans people are telling children to transition before puberty because they regret not having done so themselves. Again, a form of unethical projection.

The podcast argues that politics and medicine should not be entangled – and imply that the backlash to child sex changes is thereby illegitimate. But the “science” of sex and gender itself originated in postmodern ideology.

One other major lacuna: the podcast never tackles how many kids who have been mistakenly transed are gay and lesbian. The children most vulnerable to this irreversible medical treatment are same-sex attracted, which make the whole subject something that destroys the entire premise of a single LGBTQ+ identity. I understand that this is unsayable in the NYT, but it’s true nonetheless.

Listen to it and make your own mind up. It’s designed to engage liberals who have been accepting of anything any minority activists want. And that’s a good thing. Well-meaning liberals need to be better informed by liberals who actually care about the truth. Whether liberals can break free of the tribal politics that have frozen this medical scandal in place remains an open question. But I doubt it.

Andrew Sullivan

A very brief obituary for a very dubious bishop

I clip obituaries, as well as bios and interesting profiles. For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been systematically editing those old clips.

It may not qualify as an obituary, but Alan Jacobs, an Anglican, had some pointed words upon the death of John Shelby Spong, an apostate who nevertheless (or was it for that reason?) became a Bishop in the Episcopal Church U.S.:

John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.

Ease is the disease

In Bellevue, Washington, [Nick] lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

What Musk’s Grok thinks of Musk’s American Party

My favorite take on our newest political party is this one, brimming with nationalist scorn:

The America Party is Elon Musk’s new third-party push in 2025, born from his beef with Trump, aiming to snag a few key seats and shake up the uniparty. … It’s led by immigrants like Musk (South African) and tech bros pushing H-1B visas for cheap foreign talent over Americans. … [It’s a] power grab to flood tech with imports, under the guise of “innovation.”… It’s just elites gaming the system.

The author? Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed for The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter by its owner, Elon Musk.

Nick Catoggio

Your postliberalism versus ours

To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.

Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?

Rod Dreher, America Votes in a Clash of Postliberalisms, regarding the 2024 Presidential election.

I don’t think reframing the clash as between competing postliberalisms makes the choice clearer because I cannot identify with either postliberalism.

I fear that this really is the choice we typically face now, and I pray that whatever rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born will turn out to be a prince.

But I can’t knowingly vote for it. I refuse to choose.

Scientizing the humanities

The scientific conception of knowledge has become virtually equated with the only way of knowing there is. Not only does it dominate its own offspring, such as the social sciences and anthropology, but it has invaded the classical fields of the humanities, a fact which makes a proper understanding of poetry, for instance, almost inaccessible to the modern student. The degree to which philosophy has capitulated is clear from the extent to which it is preoccupied with such mental gymnastics as logical analysis and even mere information theory.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Thugocracy

ICE: random acts of state terror

ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notes the inevitable result of such spurts:

Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:

I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.

And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.

…

And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:

We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.

But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do.

With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror. And this, we discover, is the point. The whole purpose is to engender so much fear that migrants self-deport and potential migrants never come. The latter is an important tool for border control, as far as Miller is concerned. It’s the new wall.

…

We also have a president unique in our history in his contempt for the rule of law, who abuses the pardon power to empower lawlessness from his subordinates, deploys a rhetoric designed to encourage thuggery among the ICE rank and file, and who makes memes mocking the detained. He and his minions have also now designed a system that will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,* will not target employers, but will fill our streets with a new stormtrooper army and build super-size detention camps — some surrounded by gimmicks like gators or sharks — to generate sufficient state terror to deter anyone from coming to this country.

Andrew Sullivan

(* When Sullivan says the Administration “will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,” he’s referring to the trivial increase in immigration courts compared both to their backlogs and to the huge increase in ICE’s budget.)

Another sign (as if we needed one) that we’re authoritarian now

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book How Democracies Die.

Elisabeth Bumiller

Morality is not a language Trump speaks

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

David Brooks, Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

Wednesday, 7/9/25

Culture and stuff

America: Belated July 4 preface

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not.

Yet I am still moved to tell this Fourth of July story. It’s become an act of defiance, because the story is contrary to the prevailing values of 2025 ….

Popehat (Ken White), introducing his annual July 4 post about a 1992 Naturalization Ceremony.

Legalia: Why now?

Will Baude at the Divided Argument blog has some speculation about why it took the Supreme Court so long to rein in universal injunctions issuing from Federal District Courts.

Remembering that it’s speculation, I nevertheless find it fairly convincing, and the answer I find convincing is not that the court is partisan hacks. There’s too much evidence to the contrary, such as conservative justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, along with Justice Kagan, who’ve long said that the injunctions were dubious.

Journalism: Dumbest imaginable editorial

This has got to be one of the dumbest, most perverse uses of Opinion Page space ever: “AI fact-checked Donald Trump and this is what we learned”.

So the Washington Post writers asked major AI sites to opine on the truthfulness of 20 claims by Donald Trump. The AI sites, which learn their stuff from things like digesting newspaper opinion columns, plus the blogs and substacks of bien pensants, gave the answers that the columnist would have written without AI.

Mind you, I don’t disagree with the responses because I’m one of those bien pensants (in this context at least). But I have zero percent greater confidence than before AI reinforced my priors — and a 10% lower opinion of the Washington Post (which dropped its prices so low I couldn’t say “no” any longer) for effectively enlisting pattern engines (that’s what AI is, really) to write a literally mindless column.

Conversion therapy today

After the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, “LGBT” organizations issued statements condemning the court’s decision. I’m gay, and I welcome the court’s decision. So-called gender-affirming is a new form of “conversion therapy.” Instead of “praying away the gay,” we are “transing” it away.

…

When I reached adulthood and began to accept myself as the gay male that I am, I resolved to help create a world where children are told that it’s OK to be an unconventional boy or girl. For a while, I thought we were on the right track. But now, instead of making more space for nonconformity, we’re medicalizing it. Instead of telling kids they’re fine the way they are, we’re saying the opposite: No, it’s not OK to be this way. There is only one way to be a boy and one way to be a girl. You don’t fit. We have to fix you.

Two years ago I interviewed psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 adapted the Dutch protocol for use in the U.S. During that conversation, Ms. Edwards-Leeper used the word “cult” five times to describe what had become of pediatric gender medicine. When I told her about my own childhood, and said I feared that, if I were growing up now, I might have been falsely affirmed as a “trans girl,” she responded, “I’m sure you would have.”

Ben Appel, ‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay

I listened to all of the New York Times podcast “The Protocol,” and read Nicholas Confessore’s long piece in the Times as well. I gained fresh appreciation for the subjective good faith of many youth gender medicine practitioners who I had tended to view as profiteers and limelight-seekers.

But I have not read or heard a mainstream treatment of these fraught transitioning issues in many months that acknowledges the truth of Appel’s title: untransitioned kids with gender dysphoria usually grow out of the dysphoria and end up gay. That’s is a constant premise of Andrew Sullivan writing on trans issues, for instance. I’ve never heard it refuted, and it sure seems relevant.

An example from Sullivan, frustrated at the takeover of his gay and lesbian world and feeling briefly liberated by one of Trump’s Executive Orders on the sexual binary:

Every human being in the entire history of our species produces either sperm or eggs — that is the core truth of our species’ reproductive strategy, and it applies to intersex people too. No sane society should replace this truth with ideology about purely subjective “genders” of which there are now over a hundred (and counting) …

…

But I feel particularly liberated in this moment as a man who has been openly gay before many of these transqueers were born, who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and was front and center in the fight for marriage equality and military service (and thereby loathed by the transqueers). My gay and lesbian world has been captured by gender and “LGBTQIA+” zealots ever since we won marriage equality. They control every aspect of our community with a grip that tolerates no debate or dissent. … Lesbian bars are being shut down by governments just like the old days. But this time, it’s because these lesbians don’t want biological men in their spaces. The left is now doing to gays and lesbians what the far right used to do: police our bars.

The transqueers and their MSM stenographers have renamed us — without any actual debate — as “LGBTQIA+”, deliberately stripping us of our identities as gay men and lesbians, and conflating us with trans people with whom we have almost nothing in common.

Andrew Sullivan.

The AI tell


Source

Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

Ted Gioia.

This is why, Gioia postulates, Big Tech (notably Microsoft) is building AI into its products, upping the price, and giving consumers no choice to opt out.

That said, my means and interests led me to Voilà, an AI browser extension, for which I am paying since it saves me quite a lot of time reading articles with intriguing headlines but no substance that I’m really interested in. It’s even more amazing to have it to summarize a YouTube video, which turns a 2+ hour listen into an almost instantaneous outline.

Altruism processed through the left brain

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What are women good for?

Women, it turns out, are for what privileged, powerful men have decided everyone is for: working forty-plus hours per week to make enough money to support a consumerist lifestyle.

Charles Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Almost enough to make me a conspiracy theorist.

The Justice Department contradicted conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.

How? It released a memo saying case files on the sex offender and former financier do not include an incriminating “client list.” It also said Epstein killed himself in prison in 2019.

Why it matters: Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said a client list existed and was “on [her] desk.” Right-wing media personalities lashed out at her on social media yesterday.

Washington Post (italics added)

I thought “Right-wing media personalities” were just grifting about Epstein, but that “Bondi previously said a client list existed and was ‘on [her] desk’” is as good an excuse for a conspiracy theory as any. Too bad I don’t care enough about Epstein to join in the fracas.

Optimal trade-offs

Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic.

…

Most of us (including most pro-choice people, I think) would like to see fewer abortions—ideally none, from my point of view, but see above about why that probably isn’t the optimal number. There are also those among us who prefer anti-abortion policies that are vindictive or extreme because they are vindictive or extreme, irrespective of the practical effect these might have on the incidence of abortion. The more charitable reading of that familiar tendency is that the law is a teacher as well as a judge, communicating shared priorities and expectations, and, as such, a more stringent approach might pay long-term dividends by influencing public attitudes. The less charitable account is that vindictiveness and extremism are emotionally satisfying to the intellectually immature and the emotionally deformed.

Kevin D. Williamson, Clear But False

Politics

Gangster President

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio

Will the Texas GOP nominate a gentleman incumbent or a lout?

If [John] Cornyn is renominated, his reelection would be highly probable, so securing it would not burden the national party. With [Ken] Paxton as its nominee, the Republican Party might have to spend $250 million (Texas’s 20 media markets devour $2 million a week for saturation advertising) to drag him to victory. Even that sum might fail to do so.

Also, every national dollar spent in Texas cannot be spent elsewhere. So, if Texas’s Republicans pick Paxton in the March 3 primary next year, this would improve Democrats’ now-slim hopes for capturing the Senate.

Another dimension to the Cornyn-Paxton contest is aesthetic but has civic importance. Plainly put, Cornyn is a gentleman. This might seem like an eccentric, because anachronistic, consideration. It has, however, contemporary relevance: Any subtraction from the Republican Party’s supply of civility increases the party’s already large quotient of loutishness.

George Will

I try to keep my nose out of other states’ business, but Ken Paxton is irresistibly odious.

Choose one. Is that too much to ask?

On the unsightly sausage-making of the One Big Beautiful Bill majority:

And there were oodles of lib-owning, each example stupider than the last.

On Wednesday, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio announced that he’d had a change of heart about the bill. He had voted against the original House legislation in May, but now planned to support the even worse Senate version. Why? Quote: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.”

J.D. Vance broke the news about another belated convert on Thursday morning as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a lengthy floor speech attacking the legislation. Vance claimed on Twitter that a Republican congressman texted him, “I was undecided on the bill but then I watched Hakeem Jeffries performance and now I’m a firm yes.”

Dumbest of all was Trump flunky Jason Miller, who simplified the stakes of the debate for wary Republicans yesterday. “You can vote with [Donald Trump], or you can vote with the Democrats,” he wrote on X. “If you vote with the Democrats, you’re not voting with the Republicans. Buckle the f— up. It’s a binary choice.

…

“House Conservatives Warn They Can’t Back Senate Bill to Enact Trump’s Agenda,” the New York Times reported on June 24, in a piece written by Catie Edmondson.

The story was accompanied by a photo of—who else?—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas looking pensive. Roy is an old-school Tea Partier, always ready with a quote about the disgust he feels for Congress’ latest indefensible spending splurge. “I would not vote for it as it is,” he said last week of the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As recently as Tuesday, he was posting point-by-point analyses on Twitter explaining why the bill was a nonstarter.

You know where this is going.

…

By Thursday morning his Twitter posts had shifted to explaining how, actually, the Senate bill is a win for conservatives on Medicaid. Hours later, he completed the cave by voting for the legislation.

I don’t fault Chip Roy, a politician, for being a politician. The Republican Party since 2015 is a comprehensive study in political cowardice; it feels churlish to single him out. What I fault him for is persisting in embarrassing ideological peacocking every time a terrible bill, which we all know conservatives are going to roll over for, hits the House floor. You can prioritize good policy or you can prioritize getting reelected: Just choose one and own it. Is that too much to ask?

Nick Catoggio

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

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

June 11, 2025

Culture

Beauty

Many catholic young people should have arrived at Chartres Tuesday or Wenesday, having averaged about 20 miles a day in pilgrimage since leaving St. Sulpice in Paris on Sunday:

I spoke with a 32-year-old American priest who was there with a group of teenage boys from his local high school. He talked about the appeal of the old mass, and Catholic tradition, to kids today. They had been earlier on a retreat at the traditionalist Benedictine abbey of Fontgombault, and he said these American boys had been blown away by what they had seen and done there. The priest predicted that they were going to be overwhelmed by the beauty of Chartres. He said that most American boys their age have already seen the worst of humanity in hardcore porn, before they have ever seen real beauty. So Chartres is going to be a revelation for them.

Rod Dreher, Surprising Hope in the Streets of Paris (bold added)

What a thought! There is precious little “real beauty” around us in the USA, especially real manmade beauty. But there’s plenty of rot.

A part of the American ethic

Take, for instance, when the doctors were asked whether they would go to court to override the parents’ wishes if the child did not have Down Syndrome. They responded unanimously that they would, and they gave the following rationale: “When a retarded (sic) child presents us with the same problem, a different value system comes in; and not only does the staff acquiesce in the parent’s decision to let the child die, but it’s probable that the courts would also. That is, there is a different standard. . . . There is this tendency to value life on the basis of intelligence. . . . [It’s] a part of the American ethic.”

Justin Hawkins, Dignity Beyond Accomplishment – Mere Orthodoxy (bold added)

Sexual stereotypes

Popular sites like What to Expect verify that some aspects of child development differ by gender, yet even such sites advise parents to try to equalize or neutralize the differences. We’re so influenced by the Gender Ideology that we don’t seem to consider the possibility of embracing the children’s own preferences for activities that are “stereotypically” male or female.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

I do not recommend this book. How little did I like it? Enough that having read it when considering a conference where the author was a keynote speaker, I forewent the conference.

But it’s hard to write a whole book without an observation or two that’s both accurate and temperately made.

I am also adamant that breaking sexual stereotypes is not a sign that one is “in the wrong body.”

Marriage today

… marriage American-style, an obligation easier to walk away from than student loans or credit card debt …

Kevin D. Williamson, Husbandry Matters

Custom

I’ve been watching enough BritBox to reflexively view Elon as in the driver’s seat.

AI

Yeah, everybody’s got to prattle about AI as the topic du jour for countless jours now. I’ll try not to be anodyne or banal.

The rule of Nobody

What with expectations that AI will become our new deity, coupled with the profit motive and AI hallucinations, Matthew Crawford returns to a variation on the theme that first made him famous 16 years ago:

In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.

AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.

Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” which is Business English for “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”

Your call is important to us…. This post was remarkably persuasive to me, with a dandy analogy from “work-to-rule slowdowns” in labor disputes.

Language no longer implies thinking

LLMs (the so-called AI process) are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another …

People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence. The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain’s tendency to associate language with thinking: “We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.”

…

Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age.

Tyler Austin Harper, What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works

Enough

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

Denying our Civil Religion

America has a civil religion that is the equal of any other religion. “Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is in itself an interesting problem.” If American nationalism is so obviously a religion, in other words, why do we deny it? Bellah posits that conservative religious groups deny it because they believe that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. As recently as the 1950s they proposed a constitutional amendment recognizing the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Secularists deny that America has a civil religion because they do not believe the nation-state does or should have anything to do with religion.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Short-form social media

[W]hether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

  • “Here is some information”
  • “Look at how funny I am”
  • “Look at how stupid my enemies are”
  • “Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”
  • “Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

(Alan Jacobs)

Sorta political

Henry and Thomas

Each of Henry II and Henry VIII had a Thomas, Becket and More respectively, who were martyred for their resistance to totalitarian pretentions:

Washington has passed a law requiring that Catholic [also Orthodox, I’m sure, though with progressives one never knows] priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional …

What Henry II and Henry VIII could not live with was the idea that there were centers of power independent of the state—that the power of the king was limited. Americans supposedly cherish the notion of limited government and insist that we would abide no king, but we are in most things perfectly happy to let presidents behave as though they were Louis XIV—as long as they are doing what we want them to do, or at least as long as they are irritating and discomfiting those we regard as our rivals and enemies.

…

If you cleave to a political philosophy holding that there is nothing outside of the state, then you are a partisan, however well-meaning, of absolutism and totalitarianism. Not every totalitarian temptation indulged leads directly to 1984. … There are many stops, many way stations, and (one prays) many off-ramps along the road to serfdom. But allowing the state to shove its stupid snout into the confessional is a big step in the wrong direction. It is one that should be resisted not only by litigation but also through civil disobedience, if necessary.

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago, envisioning life under such totalitarian assumptions:

I expect to die in bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

The cardinal’s words had more impact than he intended: “I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said,” he later said about his famous statement, “but the words were captured on somebody’s smartphone and have now gone viral.” But his views were no less dramatic when expressed in less dramatic language: “The greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence,” he later wrote. And his actions bore out his convictions: When the state of Illinois insisted that funding for adoption and foster care providers would be restricted to those that agreed to provide services to same-sex couples, the cardinal, with regret, instructed Catholic Charities to refuse to comply, and the archdiocese eventually discontinued those services. That is the totalitarian tendency at work: The question wasn’t whether there would be 500 adoption agencies that serve same-sex couples but whether the 12.7 million people of Illinois could tolerate one that did not.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional

For what it’s worth: How do the bien pensants of Washington expect that a violation of this law will ever be discovered?

Department of Justice crashes

The Administration’s bad faith comes home to roost already.

Can’t be bothered to learn

Elon Musk’s disinterest in learning the first thing about government, combined with his enthusiasm for performatively cutting the parts of it that irked him politically (in at least some cases because he has become a deranged conspiracy theorist), led him to eviscerate USAID, and to brag about it on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone [sic] to some great parties.

Did that instead.

This decision led and will continue to lead to a heartbreaking amount of suffering and death — to children and babies dying because they were cut off from access to, for example, U.S.-provided peanut paste (cost: $1 a day). One statistical model published by a Boston University public health researcher projects that Musk’s cuts will cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. I have not looked closely into that model, but let’s say its estimate of 300,000 is off by a massive amount and Musk’s actions only led to 75,000 deaths. Was it worth it?

I don’t think Elon Musk woke up one day and decided to starve some Yemeni children to death. Rather, I think he couldn’t be arsed to learn the details of what he was doing, and instead succumbed to conspiracy theories about USAID (the drug use can’t have helped here), until he really did convince himself USAID was “a criminal organization” that needed to “die.”

Jesse Singal

Bro, you gave up a podcast. And you’re not divorced. Or separated.

It is easy to make fun of Dan Bongino, the emotionally incontinent former cop turned podcaster appointed for some inexplicable reason by Donald Trump to serve as deputy director of the FBI as a subordinate to Kash Patel, whose main qualification for the job was having been the author of … a children’s book about the Steele dossier, a fact that sounds totally made-up but that is totally not made-up.

And it is a good week for making fun of Bongino, who recently had a public emotional breakdown on Fox News—where else?—about how he “gave up everything” to take on a thankless job in public service. About which: Bro, you gave up a podcast. Bongino went on to say that the job was so hard that he was now divorced from his wife, only to realize that he didn’t exactly mean what he said. The bombastic mode of speech that is apparently obligatory in Trump’s orbit had served him poorly, and so he corrected himself: “separated.” But he didn’t mean “separated” the way it sounds when it is used in conjunction with “divorce.” He just meant that he’s spending a lot of time at the office away from his family.

Kevin D. Williamson

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks)

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.

Saturday, 5/31/25

AI doomsday?

[Jaron] Lanier agreed that it’s up to humans to protect the truth in the age of AI, but was less optimistic that we will do so: “The issue with AI is not the AI. It’s not the large language model. It’s the concentration of power and wealth around who owns it,” he said. “You have to look at the big system, including the people, the money, the business, the society, the psychology, the mythmaking, the politics.”

A Free Press Debate on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco

Jaron Lanier had fallen off my radar for a few years. I’ll forever be interested in his take on anything regarding computers and humanity (together, not separately).

Bon mots

Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines.

Frank Bruni. Then this, merely via Frank Bruni, not from him:

In the quarterly journal Sapir, Bret Stephens made a kind of peace with the heavily partisan slant of so much cable television news: “To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.” (Naomi Lerner, West Orange, N.J.)

A non-tribal Democrat

Some of my subscribers dislike when I throw elbows to my left. They share my disdain for Donald Trump and his party, and my commitment to understanding them in light of political theory and history, but they are also devoted Democrats who have warm feelings for Joe Biden, were thrilled by the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and still seethe about Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

That isn’t me. I vote for Democrats. I directionally agree with them on most issues. And I consider the Republican alternative thoroughly unacceptable. Yet I am not a devoted Democrat. A big part of the reason is that I’m not a joiner—of anything. I value my own independence too much and temperamentally resist deploying my talents to advance a cause—any cause, even a worthy one, and even one wrapped up, at this moment, with the fate of liberal democratic self-government in the United States.

But this way of thinking presumes that working to help the Democrats should take the form of deferring to and falling in line behind party leadership and elected officials, taking marching orders, rallying around candidates and nominees endorsed by the party bigwigs, and then maintaining message discipline to get them elected. That’s what I resist. But there’s another kind of devotion—one that expresses itself as tough love and a willingness to speak candidly, and even harshly, about faults.

…

… a Democratic researcher is quoted as saying that when she asks swing voters to liken the two parties to animals, they consistently describe Republicans as lions, tigers, and sharks—“apex predators” that “take what they want when they want”—but Democrats as tortoises, slugs, or sloths, creatures typically considered “slow, plodding, [and] passive.”

Damon Linker, A Party of Sloths

Substance, process

One of this crazy-making aspects of life in Trump 2.0 is that the media coverage of the administration’s antics focuses, mostly on the substance of what they are doing, ignoring the process, and the question of whether they have the authority to do it at all.

Such, I feared, was the infirmity of NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars, a Free Press article by a serious Ivy league constitutional law professor. I slogged my way through it, agreeing with the author again and again, but frustrated that he was ignoring the elephant in the room. Finally, in literally the last paragraph, he mentioned the elephant almost as a throwaway line:

NPR also alleges in its complaint that the federal statute creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting prohibits Trump from making this defunding decision. That’s a very different argument, which I’m not addressing here ….

I would venture a guess that nine out of ten people who read this column will come away with the impression that NPR and PBS are suffering from a liberal sense of entitlement to tax dollars, and miss the point about there being some limits to executive power.

In the end, it may not matter because this Congress is sufficiently servile that if Trump asks Congress to defund CPB, PBS and NPR (a longtime GOP talking point), it almost certainly will oblige him.

But process does matter, tremendously. Where the power to do something resides also matters.

Dissing Adoption

The New York Times … has never found a basic human good it couldn’t ponderously criticize with the shuffling-foot smarm of the ideas festival class. There’s “I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.” There’s “World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud.” There’s “Given Away: Korean Adoptees Share Their Stories.” (In easily-digestible video format!) There’s “I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict.” (Subtle.) The New Yorker, a $12,000 espresso machine transformed into a magazine by a mischievous wizard, has “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath,” and “Where is your Mother?” (The answer is that she has been separated from her child by a cruel and fickle child welfare system despite being perfectly fit, which I’m sure is how it usually goes.) The Atlantic has “No One’s Children: America’s long history of secret adoption.” (Would you be shocked to learn that said history isn’t a good one?) They’ve got “The New Question Haunting Adoption,” the question being whether adoption is really a secretly selfish act, you know, the selfish act of taking a severely-disabled toddler into your home to provide them with support and love after their birth parents smoked meth throughout pregnancy. They also have, incredibly, “What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong,” “Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending,” “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption”…. I could go on, and that’s just three prestigious publications. There’s a whole world out of this out there.

This is all, for the record, a really excellent example of what we used to mean when we used the word ideology. Once upon a time, one wouldn’t say “My ideology is…” because ideology referred to the hidden, unexplored, unconscious politics that lay beneath the public, open, explicit politics. An ideology was those pre-political assumptions and beliefs which conditioned and limited political thought, which made the conscious political philosophy of any individual what it was. Ideology is the skeleton that hides unseen within the animal of politics but nevertheless determines the structure of that which is seen. Ideology exists in both the macro and the micro; this bizarre upper-caste antipathy towards ideology is a good example. If you asked leadership at these publications if they had any particular interest in leading a charge against the practice of adoption, they’d say no, of course not, what a weird question! If you were to show them just how repetitively this particular set of critiques and questions and hrm hrm hrm noises gets published in their pages, they’d swear to you that it reflects no underlying party line. And yet there it is, the evidence, in black and white. Something about the current constitution of the anxious educated urbanite liberal soul cries out inside of them: the real problem is adoption.

Freddie deBoer, Adoption is Good

If the shoe fits

A well-regarded Evangelical pastor published this weeks before the 2020 Election.

[T]his is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

…

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

…

Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).

…

I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride.

When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.

It is naive to think that a man can be effectively pro-life and manifest consistently the character traits that lead to death — temporal and eternal.

John Piper, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election

Piper did not say who he was voting for. He did not name names. For that reason, I’m blogging this separately from pointed political material.

But I’m not going to deny that my heart soared to see that our current President had not captured and reduced to servility the entirety of one of America’s most prominent Christian traditions.

The right to know isn’t the whole story

To further clarify our situation, consider W. H. Auden’s discussion, which I’ve cited before, of the idea that, as he put it, “the right to know is absolute and unlimited.” “We are quite prepared,” Auden wrote,

“to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”

L.M. Sacasas, Structurally Induced Acedia (The Convivial Society)

Harvard and the Trump administration

Harvard and the Trump administration have each finally met an adversary too big to push around. America’s richest university never really considered how much it depends on government policy, including lavish federal research funding, federal student aid, and a permissive immigration regime for the foreign students—who make up a third of the university’s student body and often subsidize the rest by paying more. Progressives also never thought through how the many tools they devised for using government leverage against private institutions—including threatening tax exemptions, as the Supreme Court allowed on dubious grounds in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)—could be used against universities that engage in race discrimination for the “right” reasons, cultivate a political monoculture among the faculty, and permit campus mobs to terrorize minority groups who are out of progressive favor (Jews). Now, Trump is trying to strip Harvard of everything—tax exemption, federal funding, and visas for foreign students already enrolled. While the comeuppance for Harvard is admittedly delicious, the president is abusing powers he ought not to have, and Harvard has deep enough pockets to fight him in court.

National Review Weekly email.

Some cases don’t have valid arguments on both sides. That I find nothing “delicious” about Harvard’s “comeuppance” is an example of why I ignore National Review’s regular email invitations to resubscribe.

Can a car have a “catfish smile”?

“Behind that catfish smile, the company’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter DOHC V8 now discharges a drama-drenched 656 hp and 590 lb-ft—153 hp and 85 lb-ft more than the previous Vantage Roadster—thanks to larger turbochargers, revised camshaft profiles, optimized compression ratio and upgraded fueling and cooling.”

Kudos to Dan Neil for the spot-on “catfish smile.”

The car, by the way, is a 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, which will set you back $300,000 as equipped (this week’s ephemeral tariffs not included).

Credentials, good times, and genuine learning

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly …

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world …

… Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

Alan Jacobs, responding to Ted Gioia on the topic of ending AI cheating.

Potpourri

  • After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief.
  • In other Russia news, a new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station was unveiled this month. President Putin has called Stalin an “effective manager,” and has said that enemies of Russia use the “excessive demonization” of Stalin to attack “the Soviet Union and Russia.” Stalin is back, big time. Interesting that “effective manager” is being used here to describe a man who facilitated the death of millions—and not efficiently. But I’m not a businessman.
  • The continued reckoning: A postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign cited a “perception gap” as one of the reasons she lost, saying voters believed she held positions that she didn’t. “Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” But Harris had, in fact, supported all of these positions. Like, she is on record supporting each of those positions (here, here, here, and here). So it’s not really a perception problem so much as a reception problem, like these ideas are not popular even though I support them. There’s a sense among Dems that people should simply ignore the things that are unpopular and that referencing them is fake news. Like, how dare you talk about the surge of migrants coming through our new open borders thanks to swift changes from the Biden admin. Yes, it’s technically true, but it’s disinformation-coded.
  • Leave Bruce alone: A bar in New Jersey canceled a performance by a Bruce Springsteen tribute band after the real Springsteen called Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” while on tour in England. Citing the bar’s MAGA clientele, the bar owner said that a Springsteen cover band would be “too risky at the moment.” And: “Whenever the national anthem plays, my bar stands and is in total silence, that’s our clientele. Toms River is red and won’t stand for his bull—.” [But MAGA doesn’t have a violent streak. No way. That’s fake news.]
  • Things that are not antisemitism: The Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” has announced its support for Elias Rodriguez, the suspect arrested for slaughtering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week. Here’s the statement signed by the DSA Liberation folks and a bunch of others: “As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography.” And: “[T]here must be consequences for genocidal [Z]ionist imperialism, and those consequences are righteous.”

Nellie Bowles

Fake my …

The latest fitness craze is surely going to be Fake My Run. It fits perfectly with the national ethos whereby university students are already doing Fake My Education.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks)

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.