Category: AI

A little whataboutism (and more)

Whataboutism

The truths that must not be named

I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.

So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).

(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)

Who’s the more partisan Justice?

Who’s more partisan:

  • Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
  • Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?

Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)

Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP

The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated …

If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party. See also Tom Nichols, Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China.

Someone wrote about this recently.

To every thing there is a season

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

Wilfred M. McClay, A Nation’s Birthday

The End of Reading

My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:

  • Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
  • [A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
  • Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
  • Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)

Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.

A linguistic curiosity

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.

Orhan Pamuk and Ara Guler, Istanbul

AI detection

Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).

I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.

This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.

Luigi: The Musical

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes. 

Kevin D. Williamson

How I use AI

AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.

I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:

  • Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
  • Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
  • Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
  • Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
  • Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.

(H/T Jordan, The AI Chatbot as Digital Oujia Board)

In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.

So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?

Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:

  • Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
  • Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
  • Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
  • Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
  • I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
  • How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
  • How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?

Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:

  • I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
  • My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.

My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.

Shorts on the Department of Justice

  • In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
  • With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)

Shorts

  • “It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • … “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).

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

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.

June 23, 2026

Hypocrisy pandemic

[W]e find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

This paradox keeps popping up in my reading

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

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul. See also The Abundance of Less and stories about AI like the one I referred to recently.

Free to say “no”

[I]f the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Brad East, You Don’t Have to Use AI.

I haven’t hidden that I use AI and rather enjoy it. But a lot of serious people are raising questions, not about complicity in a possible doomsday but about how AI shapes its users.

Learning from the Plain Folk

When the Amish see an interesting new technology, they discuss where to ban or allow it in terms of its effects, particularly on the community.

We’re doing something like that with AI. Mercifully, most of the voices are sober, respectful, even a bit tentative, because the potential benefits are widely appreciated among the chattering class. I don’t expect the conversation to end soon, by which point habit may carry the day.

Meanwhile, Anton Barba-Kay is calling for caution, in the context of comments about Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical:

The document takes issue with “the technocratic paradigm” as one of its main foils. It defines that paradigm as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”

…

The issue is not that these are evil thoughts to think; it is that we collectively don’t think and can’t agree on anything besides. The technocratic paradigm emerges as a background consensus for lack of other commitments held across institutions, markets, platforms, and nations. And yet this just is the transhumanist lingua franca of Babel: the very terms we all use to describe what we’re up to as we construct yonder tower.

For some reason, I find this formulation unusually clarifying, more helpful than most of what I’ve read on the subject.

Nailing Jello to the Wall

On imposing spurious rationality

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful: the people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That’s all there is to say — over and over. Anything else strains the truth. Now, I find that the illogic and stupidity actually make it more difficult to provide a commentary. Analysis must necessarily impose some rational pattern on the world, but it feels like a fool’s errand or even potentially misleading to seek the whys and wherefores of how this regime makes its decisions. The “4D chess” approach to Trump punditry once imposed a spurious rationality on what was self-evidently chaos; now it feels like any attempt to understand what’s going on risks the same.

…

There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch.

John Ganz

And he doesn’t even kick enemies in the teeth very well

Commenting on this John Ganz post, which I partially quote, above, Damon Linker writes:

It’s good stuff—not least because Ganz is gesturing toward something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around and write about since at least May 2023. That’s when I wrote a two-part post titled “The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right.” This was during the brief period when it looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might successfully challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In that context, I pointed out the primary thing that separated these GOP rivals: DeSantis was a candidate of a harder-edged post-Reaganite ideology, while Trump was a post-ideological figure who promised little beyond serving as a vehicle for the enactment of a revenge fantasy. DeSantis would pursue a muscular policy agenda, but Trump would kick the right’s enemies in the teeth.

…

Trump decided he wanted to try kicking the shit out of Iran. He made the decision for no coherent strategic reason. It was all about optics and the possibility of repeating his great “victory” in Venezuela on a larger stage. But it didn’t work out as he wanted, so, as Ganz put it, Trump wants to walk away. He can always lie and say he achieved victory knowing his most credulously cultish supporters will believe the moronic deception. So that’s what he’s going to try to do.

It then falls to journalists and intellectuals to make sense of it—and we seek to do so in rational terms. Trump did X because he wanted to achieve A, but that didn’t work out, so he shifted to Y, which entailed B, etc. But this isn’t a description of what actually happened, of the actual decision-making in Trump’s head and within the administration. It’s a description by baffled observers trying to discern something coherent in what is actually just some know-nothing doofus impulsively ordering this and then that and then some other thing, based on his own mercurial sense in the moment of what’s best for him and him alone.

J.D. Vance

Robert P. George and Caitlin Flanagan, both writing at the Free Press on Monday, strike me as complementary:

  • George: J.D. Vance had himself a conversion.
  • Flanagan: It may have been a Christian conversion, but it wasn’t a full conversion to Catholicism.

Russian Conservatism

Tsymbursky rejected the aggressive geopolitical ideas of the Eurasianists, and instead proposed the idea of “Island Russia.” In Tsymbursky’s view, Russia would not benefit from challenging the US-dominated world order, as the disintegration of that order would bring chaos in its wake. Instead Russia should focus on being a regional power, and ensure peace with the West by means of a buffer zone in the form of “limitrophe states,” such as Ukraine.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

The honored few

The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.

George Will

Shorts

  • “Second Circuit: FTX CEO SBF SOL.” That is an entire case summary from (Short Circuits). When it hit me, I couldn’t stop giggling.
  • He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. (George Will)
  • I feel obliged to point out that after several references to spiders in my homily I came home after Mass to find several spiders in our bathroom. My next homily will be featuring big piles of money. (James Quinby)
  • The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (Mashall McLuhan via L.M. Sacasas)
  • I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • We’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC. (Rep. Mike Gallagher in 2024, resigning from the House)
  • When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. (Thomas Sowell)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Solstice Eve

The University As We Know It Is Finished

Nils Gilman, The University As We Know It Is Finished strikes me as a pretty good overview of what AI means to “the University as we know it.” I’ve been a bit disappointed with my subscription to Persuasion, but this makes up for a lot of boring articles.

I’ve long (always?) been ambivalent about the University as we know it. I’ve been under the impression that the “Oxbridge” way of educating surpasses even our most exclusive and competitive universities. I’ve lamented the tentacles of the military-industrial complex extending into our science and engineering colleges. I cynically am tempted to think of universities as nothing more than credential factories (except for the bit that’s drunken whorehouse).

The new reality surely will be different. I hope it will be better. If it is, I don’t see how it will avoid shrinking down to fit the relatively few young citizens who can actually knuckle down and grapple with the great and perennial issues of mankind. I’m kind of worried about the value of my fractional ownerships of student housing apartments.

But I’m kind of excited, despite my inner Eeyore, about what may emerge after what promises to be tumultuous and probably rapid change. Although I’m too conservative temperamentally to tear things down from any instinct that the replacement couldn’t be worse (see Damon Linker on that, in Shorts below), I can watch events beyond my control tear things down with equanimity if I catch a whiff of a better replacement.

A golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks

From Sara Hendren, writing about selective abortion — or is it about a “golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks”? You decide.

The occasion of Sara’s story is the pregnancy of an influencer couple, followed by selective abortion for Down syndrome, chronicled in real time as influencers are wont to do.

It has been said that the line between “influencer” and other people making money by writing on the internet is that the influencer is hawking brands.

I had internalized “influencer” as a pejorative for certain shallow content. But that just pushes the distinction question back another step — what kind of shallow content typifies the “influencer”? Maybe it really is brand-hawking.

“Turtles all the way down,” as they say.

Anyway, Sara is a smart lady, one of several super-smart cyberfriends on my cherished social medium, micro.blog. She writes frequently many places, but one of them is Comment, to which I subscribe but which I’ve been neglecting if favor of ephemera. I’m going to try to change that – and if I spend more time there, less in ephemera, that will change the tone of this blog as well.

A philosopher muses on his life thus far

Another regular at Comment is James K.A. Smith, a well-regarded philosopher about whom I’ve been somewhat ambivalent for reasons I needn’t go into. Suffice that it’s pretty stale, I’ve only heard the other side, he’s changed, and he may have outgrown my little beef with him, because he’s trying mightily to change:

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twentysomething self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning—arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison.

…

I organized my life around something like this vision. Coinciding with a religious conversion, my path to philosophy was paved with polemic and fuelled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago, I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation.

…

The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardour of the religious apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. I’m a philosopher and I’m here to help. Stand back: I know things. We can think our way out of this mess. Now here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, in the (late) middle of a life, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind. Or whether that’s even the point. As a philosopher, I’m learning how to wonder again. But before I could imagine another way to be a philosopher, I had to recognize that, first, a lot of change needed to take place in me.

James K.A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Some unexpected reality of working with AI

I recognize a lot of what Lila Shroff, America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek is talking about:

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

…

Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.”

…

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work.

The difference between my experience and these coders is that I was working on just a single project, in a chat, with no agents deployed to work in parallel (and nag me with questions). Nevertheless, I needed frequent breaks. That’s probably in part because of my age entering this strange new world.

And I’ve gotten the yellow flag, too – a reminder of AI’s limits. Not hallucinations, but “wasted” time.

The project that wore me down with Claude’s followup was some preliminary legal work for a nonprofit corporation that needs to reorganize because of exponentially increased assets. Because I relinquished my law license in 2018, and because corporate law was never my focus, I eventually called a CPA and a Lawyer about advising me (I was hoping my Claude work product might just need review), and basically learned that Claude and I collectively had missed some key distinctions, mostly on the accounting and tax status side (there are many different nonprofit tax statuses, all “tax exempt,” many “tax deductible,” but with differences that we need to nail down to do it the right way). Now maybe Claude asked questions about that, but I don’t think so.

I don’t really view my useless work product as wasted time: I’ve learned a fair amount about what AI is good for — and some of its limits.

Presidents

Overestimating the Boss

Last June, when Vice President JD Vance was defending Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s single-day strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance said, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”

“I understand the concern,” he continued, “but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Is that so?

The evidence of unreasonable pride is everywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had too much confidence in his ability to persuade Trump. For his part, Trump had too much confidence in his ability to bully Iran.

And so it turned out that the “dumb presidents” understood reality far better than Trump. There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to destroy your opponent, you’re going to have to use immense force. If you’re going to compromise with your opponent, it’s best not to lose a war (or blink in the face of adversity) as a prelude.

But Vance’s pride reveals a deeper problem. By scorning their predecessors, Vance and Trump are far too ready to reject their achievements. Trump was eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and risk squandering victories against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by tearing up the Iran deal without a viable replacement (and then launching an ineffective war), he may end up helping create a more radical, more powerful and more dangerous Iran.

In their arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu defied their predecessors in all the worst ways, and now they court a profound defeat when, not long ago, a meaningful victory, however partial, was well within their grasp.

David French

He thought he’d seen the ne plus ultra of demagoguery

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word plan 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry’s pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan—nay, a promise-to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Of course, this book was published two years before Trump rode down that escalator, and the columns collected there were earlier than that.

Re-evaluating 44

I never voted for him (his political record was far further left than his smooth speechifying would make you think), but I thought the election of Barack Obama said something good about America, and I appreciated the dignity he maintained in office (especially in retrospect).

But his execrable, brutalist Presidential Center makes me think he’s worse than I thought. The only thing that could make it worse would be gold leaf.

The Tell

9. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth berated NATO allies as “shameful” for their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting on Thursday that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result. He repeated President Trump’s previous description of the military alliance as a “paper tiger” and warned that U.S. support to NATO would not be “a one-way street.” Mr. Hegseth’s 12-minute lecture cast a chill over a meeting that had been designed to set a collaborative agenda for a summit of NATO leaders next month. He scolded allies whom he described as having failed to step up their defense spending, as the alliance agreed to do last summer, under pressure from Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hegseth reserved his harshest remarks for countries that had resisted letting American jets or ships use bases in Europe on their way to attack Iran during the war that the United States and Israel initiated Feb. 28. (Source: nytimes.com)

John Ellis News Items for June 19

Be it remembered that when we want to poo-poo Russian concerns about Ukraine getting too thick with Western Europe, and maybe even joining NATO, we insist that NATO is “purely defensive.” But under Trump, we’re treating NATO as our ally, obliged to aid us in the prosecution of a war he started without asking Congress, let alone our NATO partners, before commencing our attack.

Hungary under Orbán

Viktor Orban was not against liberal democracy; the Fidesz-drafted postcommunist constitution was and is a liberal democratic document. What Orban opposed was the post-national, post-Christian version of liberal democracy. Orban was able to do things politically that would not be constitutionally permitted in the US, in terms of promoting Christian values explicitly in law and policy. But he was able to do other things too, like offering super-generous subsidies to encourage Hungarians to have bigger families.

…

Hungary under Orban was an important experiment. Now Hungary is just one more small, godless European country.

Rod Dreher

Caveat: Dreher’s column starts with a different story than Orban and Hungary — the kind of story I wish he wouldn’t write since I really cannot do anything about Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Great Britain.

Shorts

  • [Trump] has now crested 80, and as our news-side colleague Katie Rogers wrote this week, that bothers him intensely. He may soon get a midterm comeuppance. Then the clock on his presidency starts ticking more and more loudly. Imagine the self-tributes he’ll need as medicine for all of that. We can file them under octogenarian onanism. (Frank Bruni)
  • “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” (Huck Finn via Bret Stephens)
  • Put it this way: Vance’s book is about how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards. (Alexandra Petri)
  • Even Jimmy Carter didn’t agree to be taken hostage. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • State Department official John Negroponte drolly observed after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.” A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. (Graeme Wood on the Iran MOU)
  • It is simply not a reasonable thing to respond to disliking the government of Country A by proposing that we attempt to remove the government of Country A in the hopes that whatever government that follows will be more to our liking. (Damon Linker)
  • “It’s very funny that ten years ago beltway chickenhawks adopted an unachievable phony demand to justify opposing the JCPOA, Trump didn’t realize it was fake and fought a war to get it, discovered it was unachievable, and is now giving the chickenhawks the worst day of their lives,” – Max Fisher. Karma. (Via Andrew Sullivan
  • “FFS… please stop forcing professional athletes to wear rainbow hats and jerseys in June. It’s not helping,” – Dan Savage (via Andrew Sullivan. Bravo!
  • Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I’m doing the best I can here. If I could literally rub Trump voters’ noses in it while beating them with a rolled-up newspaper, I’d, ummmmm, consider 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

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.

D Day’s 82nd Anniversary

Douthat

Is secular critique of AI adequate?

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>

If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.

Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.

Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.

Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.

Ross Douthat’s (further?) thoughts on the Pope’s AI encyclical.

Douthat is onto something, I think

We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.

Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.

[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.

…

In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …

I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.

But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.

…

if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.

This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.

Ross Douthat, Graham Platner and the Amoral Center, 6/3/26

Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):

  • “… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
  • “… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.

“Finishing the job” in Iran

I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.

Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.

Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

…

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

M. Gessen, New York Times.

Again, this merde is on a White House webpage.

Who is the real radical?

I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.

Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:

Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”

Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.

Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.

How much of what will focus your attention?

The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love. 

But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”

(Kevin D. Williamson)

Shorts

  • I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
  • School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
  • … LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
  • In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
  • I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
  • He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
  • Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Pentecost

Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.

Taking God more seriously than Caesar

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

A Virtuous Circle

Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, commenting on this video.

Lumped together

In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Start with a bad premise, end with confusion

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.

Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.

Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

Aaron Renn, Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (emphasis in original)

God and Man at Anthropic

What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.

But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

…

The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.

Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.

It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.

…

When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.

…

If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.

And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.

Avital Balwit, Searching for God in Silicon Valley.

Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.

Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Our (mumble-mumble) anniversary

Ode to Miller Lite

Let’s start on two Lite notes.

First, it has been an impossibly long time since the missus and I tied the knot, and it shows no signs of slipping. Though I did discover this morning that poetry I consider brilliantly realistic about our human foibles can strike her as depressing.

Second:

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

Tyler Austin Harper, The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage. I just liked Harper’s deft touch. The negligible amount of beer I drink is invariably the kind that demands your attention.

Digital sackcloth and ashes

I well remember the magnificent tall ships sailing into New York Harbor for America’s bicentennial, which the wife and I watched on a little black & white TV in our apartment in Watonga, OK, with a four-month-old baby nearby.

For the 250th, we’re getting UFC on the White House lawn. I expect to avert my eyes, or blog about it again (based on news reports, not firsthand observation) — digital sackcloth and ashes.

I heard this week about a mature American couple that is expatriating without expectation of return — to the People’s Republic of China, which they have visited often. (Full disclosure: the wife is Chinese, and from a wealthy family, so there’s that.)

I daydream of expatriating (today’s post reflects the dream at several points), but for a number of reasons I know it won’t happen unless I literally must flee as a refugee. I’m having a very hard time internalizing the new American reality, so diminished from what appeared to be true for most of my life.

Would that The Donald had forced himself on us, as he has forced himself on women in the past. But no, 77 million of my countrymen voted for him. By the rules of the game, he owns us fair and square.

Still timely

From the time before Il Duce returned to the Oval Office:

I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.

Garrison Keillor, Sitting Scared in Church, Thinking About Evil

You could see it coming from 15 months away

No politician in the primary era has been as aggressive as Trump has in boosting electoral challenges to members of his party who buck him. Until 2016, it would have been regarded as somewhere between a faux pas and downright reckless for a sitting president to weaken a congressional incumbent by calling for his or her ouster in a primary. Trump does it regularly now, sometimes out of petty revenge.

That’s why Bill Cassidy went wobbly on Gabbard, Kennedy, and (soon) Patel, of course. He’s up for reelection next year, has drawn a serious primary challenger, and has two strikes against him already by dint of having voted to convict Trump in 2021. Had he opposed one of the president’s Cabinet nominees, any slim chance of him receiving Trump’s endorsement—and salvaging his career—would have evaporated. Cassidy will spend the rest of his life receiving sporadic death threats from populist Republicans either as a sitting senator or as a private citizen; when you frame the choice before him on Trump’s nominees that way, is it any is it any wonder that he chose the way he did?

Nick Catoggio, The Culture of Fear, February, 2025.

So now Cassidy, defeated in his primary by Trump’s toady, gets to endure death threats as a private citizen, because MAGA doesn’t forget.

I’m troubled at the outbursts of violence from the left toward Trump and the Right, but (perhaps it’s the way news gets covered) I fear more the menace of MAGA, from whose hands guns, and from whose lips death threats, are never far.

Speaking of retribution

So Trump has knocked off two, and in a few days probably will have bagged a third, Republican Senators in retributive primary challenges.

So now that they’re lame ducks, just how compliant will they be with his will? This much, I hope.

[N.B.: Trump did indeed bag his third. May they team up and bedevil him through the rest of their terms.]

Farewell, Party; Hello Tribe

Something I hadn’t really noticed is the death of political parties.

Oh, we still have “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but those are names of opposing tribes now, not actual parties.

Principal proof: Any sleazy real estate developer from Queens can run for President as a Republican in primary elections, regardless of his past positions, his [how many?] cameos in porn flicks, his divorces, his misogyny. Heck, the Republicans didn’t even bother with a platform one quadrennium: Whatever The Donald wants today is what we want.

It hasn’t happened on the D side yet, unless you count Fetterman or Platner — neither one a clear R, but sure a poor fit as Deez.

Must we always overshoot?

A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even “just” nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the victorious democracies became involved in their program of “demilitarizing” the vanquished “militaristic” nations. In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they were forced to ask their “demilitarized” former foes to rearm, and become allies in a common defense against a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

And as long as we’re on Niebuhr:

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history.

Id.

Institutions versus platforms

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand. The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

David Brooks, America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

The French Table

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!

David McCullough, The Greater Journey, quoting James Fenimore Cooper.

Here’s Putin’s mindset: We’re the Third Rome

I debated whether this should be in Sunday’s faith-focused post, but I think it belongs here as a glimpse into how the Russian state got so thick with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch (leading to things like the Patriarch scandalously backing the war on Ukraine):

After the fall of Constantinople, an obscure monk named Filofey wrote a treatise arguing that the Greeks had been conquered because they were apostate. Three Romes now marked the history of Christendom, he claimed: the first had fallen away in 1054 [i.e., the Great Schism – Tipsy]; the second had done so in 1439 [i.e., the Council of Ferrara-Florence]; and the third, Moscow, would and could never fall until the end of time. This Third Rome doctrine, as it came to be known, was never officially endorsed. But it did illustrate the isolated mentality of Russia as she entered the sixteenth century.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

CCAI

Remember CCM? Well now we have CCAI, Contemporary Christian Artificial Intelligence, or as they seem to prefer, Gloo.

It’s “Values-Aligned AI for Faith & Ministry.”

Ummmm … Whatever.

Shorts

  • Evangelicals have not promoted a faith of word and sacrament, but one of word preached, word studied, and word shared. (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
  • Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right. (Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land)
  • The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
  • States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens)
  • J.D. Vance is more than content to be in harness, happier than a dung beetle at Trump’s all-you-can-eat raw-sewage buffet. (Kevin D. Williamson, who called Vance “coprophagic” in his preceding column. Is there a theme emerging?)
  • Trump is, indeed, dedicated to running the government like a business—la Cosa Nostra. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • I love my country, but I fit [in Europe]. In part it’s because I love history so much, and Europe has history like Idaho has potatoes. (Rod Dreher)
  • This takes us to what I think is the most important lesson my time in Europe taught me. It deepened my tragic sense of life, which is a deeply un-American thing, but an important thing to know. (Rod Dreher)
  • Mr. Paxton represents the serrated edge of the Texas GOP, for which “owning the libs” is the highest political value. (WSJ)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

A busy few days, no?

American Caesar

Once we face the low level of Caesarism and how unchoiceworthy it is, we can begin to understand the danger that follows from normalizing public discussion of it as a possibility and option. Doing so “means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule” (emphasis added). In other words, ambitious political actors will seek to create by their actions the very chaotic conditions that justify their own seizure of postconstitutional rule. This is a form of right-wing accelerationism.

Damon Linker, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and the “Red Caesar” Concept.

I’m always looking for explanations for why 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump even after January 6. (Sometimes, I hallucinate a reason, but when the fever breaks it goes away and the bafflement returns.)

I don’t think that the desirability of a “red Caesar” motivated voters consciously. I see it more as a way for MAGA intellectuals (e.g., Michael Anton, John Eastman and other Claremonsters), to try, try again to justify their support. It reminds me of how progressive intellectuals kept trying (and invariably failing), for almost five decades, to re-write Roe v. Wade so as to make it coherent.

As a disciple of Leo Strauss, the muse of Claremont, Damon Linker takes personal offense.

History Rhymes

They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.

…

Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over.

David A. Graham, The Film That Explains Contemporary America.

I’ve certainly made my opposition to Trump obvious in my writings, but I think it’s time to drop my purity tests and attend the next “No Kings” event in town.

Piling up hoards of money

I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker—we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

A backstory

No longer was it uncommon, as in the time of James Fenimore Cooper, to see a husband and wife come aboard with three or four young children, as well as a servant or two. Among the earliest of such couples were Robert and Katherine Cassatt of Pennsylvania, who in the summer of 1851 embarked on an extended sojourn abroad, stopping first in London before moving on to Paris with their three young children, Alexander, Lydia, and Mary. In Paris they settled in for an extended stay at the Hôtel Continental, and seven-year-old Mary was to remember the day of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état the rest of her life. It would also be said that her interest in painting began then, which would appear to make her the youngest American thus far to have come under the spell of the arts in Paris.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Pizzagate Redux?

Pizzagate lost relevance over time, usurped by marginally less insane conspiracy theories about rigged elections and the “deep state.” So it felt newsy when J.D. Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd last Tuesday that mentions of pizza and grape soda in some of the Jeffrey Epstein files had piqued his interest. “I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory,” he marveled at the language. “We should absolutely investigate.”

That was interesting for two reasons.

First, at a moment when swing voters and even certain “America First” postliberals are experiencing buyer’s remorse, it was useful of the VP to remind the country that Donald Trump’s movement has always been powered by febrile cranks and grifting sociopaths keen to monetize their paranoia.

Nick Catoggio, The Hidden Hand

Second, Turning Point USA is becoming the Zelig of febrile crankery and grifting sociopathy in the 2020s. (And no, that was not Catoggio’s second reason.)

He has put down the mighty and exalted the humble

10. The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. will enhance human work not replace it — is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees. All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients. (Source: nytimes.com)

11. Bhaskar Chakravorti:

Digital Planet, my research center at Tufts University, recently released the American AI Jobs Risk Index, assessing vulnerabilities across 784 occupations. The economics are striking: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5 million jobs and $1.5 trillion if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable. (Sources: ft.com, digitalplanet.tufts.edu, fletcher.tufts.edu)

Both items from John Ellis News Items

My latest AI adventure

Tuesday, I groped for a half-remembered poem, and finally consulted the oracle, Claude AI:

I’m trying to recall a poem, with a woman author, that counsels against the party of certainty and for the party of awe. Can you help.

Claude went through iterative searches, fixated on my “party of certainty” and “party of awe” phrasings.

It came up dry but offered this:

…

A few other possibilities worth considering:

Mary Oliver, who consistently urges readers toward wonder over certainty in the natural world
Lisel Mueller, whose poem “Alive Together” meditates on contingency and astonishment
Naomi Shihab Nye, who writes about wonder and humility

Mary Oliver rang a bell for me, and I told Claude so.

” Mysteries, Yes” seems like a very strong candidate — it’s directly about marveling at mystery rather than demanding answers. Let me fetch the full text.

(Me:) I believe this is the one

(Claude) — “Mysteries, Yes” by Mary Oliver. It maps perfectly onto what you described. The poem opens by declaring that we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood, and closes with this counsel:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Those were exactly the lines I half-remembered. I told Claude so.

Okay. This is why I don’t shun AI. But then Claude gave me strokes:

[Y]our summary of it — “the party of certainty versus the party of awe” — is honestly a more memorable distillation of its argument than most critical descriptions I’ve seen. It captures exactly what Oliver is doing in those final two stanzas.

I think Claude likes me! Is it any wonder that people anthropomorphize, and some even have AI girlfriends or boyfriends?

And, by the way, those lines I half remembered come at the end of a poem I don’t think I’d ever read in full.

Beware “the colon movies”

I liked “Project Hail Mary” until I didn’t, couldn’t, wanted to get on with my life, wanted to hit the men’s room, wanted to hit whoever had edited (or, rather, failed to edit) this needlessly epic adventure …

It’s as if Hollywood is punking us. How else to explain stretching a Tom Cruise stunt-a-thon to two hours and 43 minutes and then calling it “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”? The italics are mine; read them as a primal scream. “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” lasts two hours and 49 minutes. It’s supposedly the end of impossible missions, but nothing ends anymore. By the current illogic of interminable narratives, there will surely be a “Mission: Impossible — One More Reckoning for the Road,” and it will be longer than the audiobook of “Middlemarch.” Cruise’s first “Mission: Impossible,” from 1996, is one hour and 50 minutes.

…

Explanations vary. Many Hollywood executives and moviemakers apparently believe that if you’re going to lure people out of their homes and away from their smaller screens to the communal experience of the multiplex — and if you’re also going to ask them to fork over roughly $30 for a ticket, popcorn and a soft drink — you better promise them a real event, even a spectacle, something with a sense of amplitude. That means three hours and one minute of “Avengers: Endgame,” three hours and 12 minutes of “Avatar: The Way of Water” and three hours and 17 minutes of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” (Beware the colon movies — or at least make sure you haven’t planned anything else that day.)

Frank Bruni

Having just finished reading Middlemarch a few weeks ago, that line about Middlemarch busted me up.

Prequel

From today’s by Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. (S.D. Tex.) in Patel v. Figliuzzi, which stemmed from his exchange on MSNC’s Morning Joe with defendant Cesare Frank Figliuzzi, Jr., “the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI”:

Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”

Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”

Patel claimed the “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building” was actionable defamation, but the court found that it was nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole instead:

“Rhetorical hyperbole” is a subset of opinion, which Texas courts have “defined as extravagant exaggeration that is employed for rhetorical effect.” “Statements that would be perceived by the audience as ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ do not constitute defamation.” In this way, Texas law protects “statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual.” “Whether an utterance is … rhetorical hyperbole turns not on what the speaker intended but what a reasonable person would believe and presents as a question of law for the court to decide.”

Eugene Volokh, FBI Director Kash Patel Loses Defamation Lawsuit Over Morning Joe Statements

This decision came down Tuesday, the day after Patel sued the Atlantic for reporting that he’s a lush.

N.B.

Some words about the arc of my writing over the past ten years or so.

I didn’t take Donald Trump seriously when he came down the (golden?) escalator in 2015.

  • He never held any fascination for me.
  • I didn’t buy his (ghost-written?) book.
  • I didn’t watch any of the beauty pageants he bought so he could talk to cute girls and they’d have to listen (and could walk through dressing rooms when they were half-naked).
  • I didn’t watch any of his reality TV or gladiator spectacles.

Because I hadn’t followed him at all, I didn’t know he was a sexual predator (serial adulterer, yes) or a chronic liar (I’m not going to soften it by calling it “bullshitting”). I was sort of aware that he was incompetent enough to have bankrupted a casino (!) and other businesses.

I was alarmed when my former major party gave him the nomination. (I wish we could go back to smoke-filled rooms instead of rage-filled primary voters.) I opposed him as soon as he started dehumanizing people on the campaign trail. I was incredulous when he won the 2016 general election. I was not reassured when he assumed office by forcing his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to begin the gaslighting immediately. I was mildly reassured when he surrounded himself with pros who became the grownups in his room. I was pleasantly surprised when he honored his pledge about SCOTUS nominees.

This narrative is getting tedious, so I’ll cut to the chase: I ream out Trump and the GOP because I once was a Republican, and I feel their betrayal even though I repudiated the party in 2005. I wish I could ignore Trump, a toxic narcissist, but he very deliberately commits daily outrages to keep attention on himself, and fool though he be, as POTUS he is a very consequential fool.

I rarely ream out the Democrats because I have no stake in them, present or historic.

I have never even been able to consider Trump the lesser evil candidate because the Democrats aren’t actually demons and with them I’d at least be confident that there would still be elections in four years. Nevertheless, I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972.

My state is very red, and my half-hearted blue vote won’t change that. So I vote for the Christian Democrats.

Trump’s damage to the nation (and to the GOP) will not be repaired in my lifetime, nor (probably) in my son’s lifetime. Maybe during my grandchildren’s lives.

I was a conscientious objector and I’m close to pacifist. I won’t take up arms. But I will protest in the ways my conscience allows, and this blog has been one of those ways.

Shorts

  • [T]he nuclear question had been resolved peacefully by the JCPOA before Trump tore it up, and any remaining serious nuclear threat had been “obliterated” last year …. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • We see the victims of bad drug approvals, but victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials are practically invisible. (The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman)
  • President Trump has been rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral creature. Who could stand up to him? (Maureen Dowd. The answer is “Pope Bob.”)
  • Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
  • For a variety of reasons, in recent decades the rate of profit to be made by producing goods has fallen below the rate of profit to be made through finance. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)
  • Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. (Mark Twain)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

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.

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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.

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

I’m surprised by my reaction to the war on Iran.

  • We are at war.
  • Everything about our entry into this war was wrong.
  • Articles of Impeachment should have been passed by now, with the Senate gearing up for trial.
  • Much as I detest Trump, I cannot root for America to lose.
  • But I can root for Americans, hurt in the pocketbook by his tariffs and the disruption of world oil flow (his general barbarity having passed without objection), to get furious and crush his bootlickers this Fall.

Mind you, this is reaction, not analysis. I have no qualifications to analyze the conduct of the war.

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

In his final year of teaching in Baylor’s Honors College, Alan Jacobs appears to be at the top of his game. He in particular has made me aware that there are, in theory, ways for conscientious profs to liberate their students from the stultifying pressure to let AI write their essays for them.

Now in his first column for the Dispatch, he gets a bit more concrete. For instance:

When I have talked with my fellow professors in the Great Texts program at Baylor’s Honors College, I have learned a few things. Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like “What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?” This allows the professor to discover whether the student actually knows what he or she is talking about. In such situations, and in full oral exams, there are few ways to hide your ignorance. Professors who teach this way can largely (if not wholly) ignore the AI freakout.

…

Properly understood, the disruption of humanities teaching by AI is a gift, and I plan to receive it as such, rather than complain about a burden. As a teacher, I find these new conditions invigorating and refreshing. I feel like Charles Foster Kane when he started his career as a newspaper publisher: I don’t know how to teach masterpieces of literature and philosophy and theology, I just try everything I can think of. I find that my students—even if they’re not always as excited as I am—welcome these experiments and are quite willing to engage in them.

…

[F]or me, the rise of the chatbots has been an unexpected, late-career gift. It has made my teaching more fun for me, and I think more interesting for my students. And I believe the lessons I have learned can be generalized.

…

By depriving students of constant AI use—or, to put it more accurately, by allowing them some respite from the tyranny of the chatbots over their lives—we actually enable them to exercise their minds in unfamiliar, and for some unprecedented, ways. 

In short, there’s a great opportunity here for those who want to take it. Humanities professors of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our self-forged chains.

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

Also in Texas, the private start-up University of Austin suffered an exodus of academic talent after its principal funder, Joe Lonsdale, strong-armed the institution into embracing “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti]-identity politics, and anti-Islamism.”

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

This is a bitter, bitter disappointment for me, as I suspect it is for Pano Kanelos, who left the Presidency of the estimable St. John’s College – Annapolis to become the Founding President of University of Austin.

Is the idea of starting a new, excellent and free university Quixotic in the 21st century? Will moneyed barbarians always be in the saddle?

Tu quoque

Every one of these ideas is terrible — because every one of them follows from a fundamental failure to grasp the character of political reality in the United States. Hauling members of the opposing party before state tribunals for official condemnation, packing the country’s highest court with judges guaranteed to hand down decisions favorable to progressives, or otherwise altering the rules of American politics to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents — none of that would move the country toward anything resembling “reconciliation.” On the contrary, it would move the country several steps closer to being torn apart.

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

The same observations apply to MAGA smashing norms in 2025-26 “to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents.” The main difference is that MAGA is explicit about seeking to smash and humiliate, not reconcile.

Infantile rebellion

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity.

Carl Trueman, Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society – First Things

Wordplay

So many felicitous phrases to brighten my day (via Frank Bruni)!:

  • In The Guardian, Dave Schilling considered an icy spectacle that has received more attention than usual lately: “Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a ‘puck.’ It’s adorable. It’s like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for people missing teeth.”
  • In The Times, Wesley Morris argued that the real appeal of the hit television series “Heated Rivalry,” set in the world of professional hockey, isn’t the sex: “The talking is the strength of the show. On the one hand, big deal. Men have never been doing more talking. They’re talking so much that we now refer to that talking as the manosphere, meaning that the chat has achieved a degree of gaseousness that only earth science can name.”
  • W.J. Hennigan pondered the prickliness of a member of Trump’s cabinet: “For a guy who calls himself the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth sure is defensive.”
  • In a post on X, Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, made fun of many Republicans’ tortured efforts not to call the attack on Iran by a certain three-letter word: “It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.”
  • In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wondered about Trump’s focus and coherence amid his shifting explanations for military strikes against Iran: “The president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.”

Shorts

  • …sexless epileptics jerking and lurching across a dance floor, lewd yet without the touch of a human hand. (Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes, describing school dances of the period)
  • … “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. (Poems Ancient and Modern)
  • Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights (bold added).
  • I recently heard of some new protein-heavy martini, which a comedian said tastes like a podcast. (My social medium friend Jeremy Abel, a fellow Hoosier.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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, March 5

I seem to be publishing more frequently. That’s at least partly because I hate to write something and then have it obsoleted by, say, a 2 am Truth Social Administration reversal. Better obsoleted after I publish.

Truth and Facticity

I recall, as a High School Senior, giving a metaphorical side-eye to our English teacher, fresh out of college, barely 3 years older than us (because he flew through college), somehow distinguishing truth from fact.

I was having none of it, and began to suspect that he was unsound (this was, for those who don’t recall my life story, an evangelical Christian school). Squishy non-factual “truths” clearly were an oxymoronic slippery slope (though “slippery slope” wasn’t yet in common coinage so far as I can recall).

These days, it feels as if I’m mostly interested in supra-factual truths: myths, poetry, tall tales generally. Before there was Iain McGillchrist, there was Michael Polanyi, and then, if not earlier but undetected, the spell of fact had been broken.

I’ve joked that my gravestone should read “Darn! Just when I almost had it all figured out!” I’m still reading as if I’ll figure it all out some day, but “it” is now rarely popularized treatments of science, or political polemics, or even “theology” in a cataphatic key.

Iran war

My spirit animal writes on Iran

Meanwhile, the best thing I’ve seen on our war on Iran so far is from center-left Damon Linker: Zero Cheers for Trump’s Regime Change War. That was true when I wrote it Monday or Tuesday and it’s still true.

Linker and I had similar breaks with the GOP, but he wised up 22 months or so before I did:

  1. He broke with the GOP over the Iraq war, which he opposed from before the onset and ended center-left. I thought that Bush was under a regrettable political necessity, wrought by 9/11, to do something big and hostile in the Middle East.
  2. I didn’t break until Dubya pledged in his second inaugural address to eradicate tyranny from the world. I ended on the center-right, if only because I’m very concerned about the insanity I’d be associated with if I were further right.

I find an awful lot of wisdom in what Linker has to say.

An explanation of the war

President Metamucillini can’t give a consistent account of our objectives in Iran, but our co-belligerent did:

A senior Israeli military official said Israel’s objective was to “dismantle the regime’s military infrastructure, including the IRGC” as well as Iranian nuclear sites, military production facilities and space and cyber capabilities. “We’re preparing for several long weeks,” the official said. They said the “third phase” of the war was under way. That followed a first phase that consisted of deadly opening strikes in Tehran on Saturday targeting the Iranian leadership, followed by a second phase of “100 hours” focused on destroying ballistic missile, drone and air-defence capabilities. A former senior Israeli official who is familiar with the current war plans warned that “this will take time . . . There is a lot of work to be done. Iran is huge.”

Financial Times via John Ellis News Items for March 5. Note that the Israeli official does not mention regime change, though dismantling the IRGC would come pretty close to that.

The Free Press and The Dispatch

I am a charter subscriber to both the Free Press and the Dispatch. I’m not giving up on either of them, but it seems to me, at least this morning after a weekend flurry of Free Press articles on our Israel-aligned attack on Iran, that the Free Press has a stableful of clever contributors with prominent names while the less prominent folks at the Dispatch not too infrequently achieve something wise or at least wisdom-adjacent.

We’ll see if that impression sticks. It may just be a side-effect of the Free Press covering so many things that do not interest me. It seems almost flighty, nerve-wracking. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to cut back on news consumption.

Sissy boys

As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Ben Appel. I highly recommend this article if you’re unsettled about “LGBT” issues. Appel has been through, and thought through, a lot, with a personal authority I lack. (That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he, a clever writer, says.)

Some of those gender nonconforming kids grow up to be gender nonconforming straight adults, too. Tomboys aren’t all lesbians; sissy boys aren’t all gay. It’s the flip side of the macho guy hidden in the closet.

The assumption that they are all LGBs of some sort is a subset of stereotyping. Stereotypes arise for a reason, but they’re not infallible guides. We probably can’t function without them, but they can do a lot of harm, too. Being a sometimes-thoughtful American, I’m thinking foremost of racial stereotypes in the harmful category, but sexual stereotypes are in the frame, too.

I haven’t sorted through that beyond musing that (1) we must resist unjust stereotypes and (2) our inevitable failures are part of why we need grace — from God and between one another.

That’s right, I’m not from Texas

I lived in Texas briefly, and I liked it. My inlaws lived in Texas briefly. I have a brother and some of his descendants settled in Texas, not briefly.

But I’m glad I don’t live in Texas now:

“The correct strategy for any candidate is to tie yourself as closely to President Trump as possible,”Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told TMD. “We can expect the Paxton campaign to really hit him [Cornyn] hard on this … that he’s insufficiently conservative, and that his track record has not always been nearly as supportive of President Trump as Ken Paxton’s record.”

Jones told TMD that while “Paxton has been a die-hard Trump supporter from the very beginning, Cornyn has ebbed and flowed” in his support for Trump. The Cornyn campaign has taken steps to address this, such as flagging that he votes in line with the White House 99 percent of the time. But Paxton—who appealed the 2020 election results to the Supreme Court, seeking to throw out electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, based on Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud—has worked to position himself as the authentic MAGA option.

…

“Republican primary voters are very much aware of his legal baggage,” but they “discount it pretty heavily as partisan,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillison told TMD. “They know that he has ethical and legal baggage, but they see him as a knife fighter, and that’s what they want.”

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, Ross Anderson, The Texas Primaries.

So why does this make me glad I don’t live in Texas?

  1. It sounds like Texans don’t know there’s a difference between following Trump and being a conservative.
  2. Although Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff election in May, in a sane state a corrupt knife-fighting Trumpist would not have come close enough to a proven conservative to force a runoff.

But what do I know? I’m not from Texas.

Thumbnail Geek autobiography

For a guy of my advance years, I’m a bit of a geek. Oh, I long ago gave us being my lawfirm’s tech guy, and left the Microsoft cosmos at the office when I retired to my cozy Appleworld.

But as I typed a Markdown file recently, I had a flashback to my former bafflement with the idea of hyperlinks, and trying to figure out what they’d be useful for (versus a cute useless parlor trick).

I remember, earlier, standing slack-jawed at the Novell booth at the ABA’s Technology in the Practice of Law show/conference in Boston, in 1988, wondering why in the world anyone would need to connect computers to one another. (I went to Boston that year with a TRS0-80 Model 100 for daytime note-taking and a 16-pound NEC Multispeed HD luggable for evening processing — which ironically required a primitive connection between computers).

Now it’s AI I don’t understand, only this time I’m reassured that nobody understands it, and bummed that everybody’s fearful about it.

When you believe in things
You don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way

(Wonder, Stevie, Superstition, 1972)

What ultimately made me back off may have been that questions arose faster than I could find answers and I decided to leave it to guys who figured out those things for a living, focusing on what I did for a living.

I still have impulses, like glancing longingly at Linux, but I’ve learned to stop at loving glances most of the time.

Now, I’ve got to go figure out some more of the settings on my new Android-based e-reader. It’s not like iOS you know.

Unitary Executives

Listening to the March 3 Advisory Opinions podcast, I agree with Sarah and David that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t justify altering “Unitary Executive Theory,” but the occupant being Donald J. Trump instead of George Washington (the president when Article II Section 1 was adopted) does focus the mind on a question:

  1. Was and is the strong Unitary Executive Theory wrong?; or
  2. Is the strong Unitary Executive Theory right, and we must simply rely on impeachment if we continue electing, ummmm, less than optimally stable and conscientious Presidents?

I’m increasingly leaning toward strong Unitary Executive Theory being wrong, neat and tidy though it be. I also confess that if someone sane were in the White House exercising strong Unitary Executive Theory, fewer articles would have been written revisiting it (here, for instance) and I would have been less eager to read them.

Routed

Speaking of unstable and unfaithful Presidents, Team Trump has fled the federal courts, tail between its legs, on one of its earliest and most egregious outrages: the effort to intimidate the entire legal profession by punishing firms who employ lawyers who sometime or other were adverse to Donald J. Trump (shared link).

The judge overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine,” later writing that the administration had sent a clear message, “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” The orders, she wrote, were “an unprecedented attack” on foundational constitutional principles.

And this from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The larger goal of the executive orders was chilling. The president attacked a bedrock principle of the law, which is that everybody deserves legal representation. He sought to frighten lawyers from representing people who had the temerity to criticize him. By extension, he sought to frighten any Americans who might criticize him.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president.

Pre-publication “update”: maybe not.

Shorts

  • Peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to co-operation and common creativity among countries and nations. (Mikhail Gorbachev via Economist World in Brief)
  • SOTU
    • Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days. (Frank Bruni)
    • I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s [SOTU]comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae. (Frank Bruni)
  • I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. (Marilynne Robinson)
  • The tide has so turned on adolescent “gender confirmation” hormones and surgeries, a madness and abdication of adult responsibility that long horrified me, that I don’t even read all the latest news items and commentary about the return to sanity.
  • There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work. (Jonathan Biss, Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie)
  • There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. The “Ghosts” were hell-dwellers on a day trip to heaven.)
  • They took paradise and put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell)
  • Beauty will save the world. (Dostoevsky)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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.