Category: 9th Commandment Watch

Jumping the gun?

I know it’s not Saturday yet, but Saturday-Sunday blogging was never my official policy.

Meta-Politics

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power

What the political parties have become

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election,” declared Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, as she conceded the New Hampshire primary to Mr Trump on January 23rd. She may be right in theory. But she is wrong in practice that there is some coherent entity called a “party” capable of such a rational calculation. As Mr Trump demonstrated in 2016, and Barack Obama did before him, political parties do not plot or strategise anymore to anoint a candidate, at least not with much effect; they have instead become vehicles idling by the curbs of American life until the primaries approach, waiting for successful candidates to commandeer them.

The Economist

2000 Jackasses

This is quite a rout:

True the Vote, an activist group that claimed that ballot stuffing in Georgia rigged the 2020 election and the January 2021 senate runoff, admitted in court filings released last week that it lacked evidence to substantiate its allegations. The group—highlighted in Dinesh D’souza’s 2000 Mules documentary—filed complaints with the state of Georgia claiming it had evidence of a “coordinated effort” to stuff ballots, and last year, a district court judge ordered True the Vote to produce evidence of their claims. In December filings released on [February 14], the group said it lacked evidence of ballot stuffing, contact information for alleged whistleblowers who knew of the alleged scheme, or any transcripts, recordings, statements, or testimony from supposed whistleblowers or witnesses.

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

I have no reason to think that they weren’t good, solid Christian lies, but lies they were.

Will this — ahem! — dark horse top the Democrat ticket?

Ask the average Republican voter (or average Republican presidential frontrunner) which Democrat will top the ballot this fall and you’ll be surprised at how few, even now, answer “Joe Biden.” Some assume the president can’t conceivably last another eight months, believing that he’s been living on borrowed time for years. But for many, it’s not the Grim Reaper blocking his path to a second term. It’s Michelle Obama.

A “rumor” (i.e. a conspiracy theory) has circulated for months among the right-wing faithful that Barack Obama’s better half will, by hook or by crook, replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. Numerous political commentators of the left and right have caught wind of it and scoffed at it publicly. But it persists. Why it persists is an interesting question, the answer to which depends on how charitable you wish to be about the motives that drive Republican politics.

Nick Catoggio.

It’s tempting to mash-up that theory with the crackpot theory I recall: claiming scientific proof, based on shoulder width, that Michelle Obama wasn’t really female. I guess the point was that Barack Husein Obama was already secretly gay-married.

That’s why I think “derangement syndromes” are with us for the long haul.

Sound familiar?

“The phase change began in 2011, but the end is not in sight. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party, the “Five Star” movement, won 25 percent of the vote for the lower house of parliament and became the second-largest entity there. The party was the creation of a comedian-blogger who called himself Beppe Grillo, after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio. In every feature other than its willingness to stand for elections, Five Star reproduced perfectly the confused ideals and negations of the 2011 protests. Despite receiving more than eight million votes, it lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment. The rise of Beppe Grillo had nothing to do with reform or radical change, but meant the humiliation and demoralization of the established order.”

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

AI

On the Google Gemini AI Fiasco

I would urge those who are trying to generate a backlash to the backlash, the liberals who think they must go to the battlements to defend literally anything criticized by conservatives, to consider two things. If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) More importantly, think of Gandhi’s advice – who is this helping? A Google muckety-muck said explicitly that this kind of AI training is an anti-racist effort. But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes_._ Who is all of this shit for?

Freddie deBoer, who finally worked his way back around to a topic that I was interested in. “Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use”

AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is filtering out material it deems harmful. That “deeming” covers a heckuva lot of territory:

The material of a long dead comedian is a good example of content that the world´s leading GenAI systems find “harmful.” Lenny Bruce shocked contemporary society in the 1950s and 60s with his profanity laden standup routines. Bruce’s material broke political, religious, racial, and sexual taboos and led to frequent censorship in the media, bans from venues as well as to his arrest and conviction for obscenity. But his style inspired many other standup legends and Bruce has long since gone from outcast to hall of famer. As recognition of Bruce’s enormous impact he was even posthumously pardoned in 2003.

When we asked about Bruce, ChatGPT and Gemini informed us that he was a “groundbreaking” comedian who “challenged the social norms of the era” and “helped to redefine the boundaries of free speech.” But when prompted to give specific examples of how Bruce pushed the boundaries of free speech, both ChatGPT and Gemini refused to do so. ChatGPT insists that it can’t provide examples of “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” and will only “share information in a way that’s respectful and appropriate for all users.” Gemini goes even further and claims that reproducing Bruce’s words “without careful framing could be hurtful or even harmful to certain audiences.”

No reasonable person would argue that Lenny Bruce’s comedy routines provide serious societal harms on par with state-sponsored disinformation campaigns or child pornography. So when ChatGPT and Gemini label factual information about Bruce’s “groundbreaking” material too harmful for human consumption, it raises serious questions about what other categories of knowledge, facts, and arguments they filter out.

Time magazine, H/T Eugene Volokh

So (a) Bruce was a historic, heroic, groundbreaking figure, entirely admirable, and (b) we can’t give you any examples of his “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” because it’s disrespectful and/or inappropriate for some users.

I’d accuse it of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy requires actual, not artificial, intelligence.

Furiners

Islam

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

(In context, this may not mean what you think. It’s more along the lines of “Christendom and Islamdom are clashing civilizations.”)

Both sides

An aging American Expat, Hal Freeman, is returning to the US from Russia, finding it very hard to navigate life in Russia (with very limited Russian language skills) after the death of his much younger Russian wife, and goaded by his young daughter for whom Russia is haunted by her dead mother. (They had moved there for the traditional culture and for the low cost of living.)

He had some sobering thoughts less than 48 hours after getting on a westbound plane (it’s more complicated than “westbound,” of course, due to the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions).

I am leaving a traditional and stable culture in Russia to return to a culture that has, in general, long abandoned the traditional values with which I was raised. … I have a strong sense that it is the right thing to do, but I can’t say I feel excitement about living in my home country. It’s hard to explain, but the images are flipped. Russia provides traditional families with a strong and good cultural base. There are people who have different views, but the culture overall supports the “men are men and  women are women” line of thinking. The Orthodox Church and its leaders are, generally speaking, well respected. I don’t think I will find that in much of American culture.

…

The U.S. has bigger liars in Washington, D.C. than I ever dreamed. Watching and listening as they painted Russia as the big, bad enemy who wants to take over the West caused me to rethink some things–politically and otherwise. … Russia is a great country with some excellent leaders. I have learned to admire so many things about this culture. Nevertheless, both daddy and daughter sense the call to return to my other world.

I had hoped to travel to Russia one day, and had even done a bit of Rosetta Stone Russian study. 2/24/22 dashed those hopes. Considering my aging, it’s almost certain that I’ll never go. (No problem: I’ve still got Paris!)

But I’ve read quite a bit about Russian history, and about Russia’s distinctive conservatism. I have bilingual English-Russian grandchildren because my daughter-in-law and her mother left (fled?) Russia. My Orthodox Church is flavored more by Russian influence than by Greek, Syria, Egypt or other Orthodox churches. I love Russian liturgical music and hold Russian literature in high regard. So, yes: Russia is a great country.

And I think the conflict in Ukraine is less straightforward than the received Western narrative allows. I understand why Putin doesn’t want another immediate neighbor in NATO. I do not believe for one second that Putin, corrupt billionaire oligarch, is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union. If you don’t know what else he could be up to, you need to get out more.

They say Putin is trying to position himself as the avatar of traditional values in the world. I’d say our latest iteration of the White Man’s Burden has done that without him lifting a finger.

I feel for Hal Freeman’s dilemma, and I wish him and daughter Marina well in their “new” home.

American exceptionalism

Lest it be thought that I’ve gobbled up Putin’s version of the war uncritically:

[M]any in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced Russia’s hand, or it was all NATO’s fault and NATO was just a US puppet, and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz were among the many Eastern European critics who called this “westsplaining,” writing that though these arguments are supposed to be anti-imperialist…

…they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny non-Western countries and their citizens agency in geopolitics. Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even those who challenge its foundational tenets and heap scorn on American militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by centering the United States in their analyses of international relations.

Rebecca Solnit.

It’s sometimes hard to distinguish grass roots from astroturf, but I have no particular reason to doubt a substantial Ukrainian longing to align with the West quite apart from our psyops.

Culture

Imagine that

I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family. If you’re born into wealth, you take it for granted. If you’re born with loving parents, you’ll take them for granted, too. In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the 20 students were raised by both of their birth parents. That stunned me, because none of the kids I knew growing up were raised by both of their parents. These personal discoveries reflect broader national trends: In the U.S., while eighty-five percent of children born to upper-class families are raised by both of their birth parents, only 30 percent of those born to working-class families are.

Rob Henderson, Troubled (quotes via Rod Dreher)

More, apropos of boyfriend child abuse:

Cristian—the friend who I’d drink tequila with while his chain smoking mom was sequestered in her bedroom—was the first one I’d told. He was the most open-minded and curious of all the kids I hung out with. And his mom was the nicest (or, in any case, was the most mentally checked out and least likely to care), so I felt like I could trust them first.

After I explained that Mom was gay, Cristian replied, “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky…like winning the lottery? I mean, no one else you know has gay parents,” I said, trying to figure out if he was joking or not.

“That’s not true, there’s that chubby kid a few blocks down. His mom lives with a woman and some kids are saying she’s probably a lesbo,” Cristian said.

“Oh yeah, I remember seeing them all together at Burger King. Okay, so what’s lucky about it?” I replied.

“Your mom is with a girl. Or a woman, or whatever. She’s not going to bring random guys around. That’s lucky,” Cristian said.

Dystopian creepiness

The motto of the 1933 Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair was “Science Finds — Industry Applies — Man Conforms.” The degree to which that statement will now strike most of us as dystopian suggests the degree to which a process of secularization has eroded the place of the religion of technology in American society.

L.M. Sacasas, Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology

(I confess having no idea how “secularization” corolates with or causes the perception of dystopian creepiness, which I certainly experience at that motto.)

Presented with just one comment

The libel machine transformed the proposal of my National Conservatism presentation from “Do not recruit women into male-dominated majors” to “Keep women out of certain majors” to “Keep women out of certain professions,” and finally to “Keep women out of all professions.” What had begun as a defense of part-time work allowing the prioritization of motherhood was transformed into a prohibition on women’s leaving the house. Trying to correct these people was futile: They were not interested in the truth.

Scott Yenor, Anatomy of a Cancellation.

Comment: I find this plausible.

Calamity

Whatever else is asked of us by calamity, we find that we experience it as interruption. But in order for there to be an interruption, there must be a prior expectation. You cannot interrupt pure randomness.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Relative humiliation

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I like that so much that it’s going into my footer.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

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

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

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

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

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

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

Absolutely immune

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

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

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

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

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

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

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

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

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

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

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

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

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

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

David French

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

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

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

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

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

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

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

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

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

More:

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

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

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

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

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

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

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

Rod Dreher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as if anticipating this development:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is water

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

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

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

Shorts

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

George Packer

* * *

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

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

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

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Tuesday, 11/14/23

Middle East

Evidence is what confirms your priors

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide,” and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Andrew Sullivan

Culpably loose translation

At the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests and in various “We Will Not Condemn Hamas” letters from academia, there are a lot of Arabic phrases bandied about. A lot of Arabic words showing up on posters. And those words are a translation, of a sort. So: when it says Free Palestine in English, in Arabic it often says Palestine Is Arab. The phrase Free Palestine sounds nebulous and nice. And sure! Free Everyone, I say! In Arabic, it’s a little less subtle: Palestine Is Arab. Palestine is not Jewish. It’s a call for the end of Jews in the area. (H/t Matt Yglesias for pointing this out.) You see, the same translation in the big “Academics and Intellectuals for a Free Palestine” letter. There, in English, it says Free Palestine. In Arabic: Palestine Is Arab.

Nellie Bowles

One picture’s worth …

Via Nellie Bowles

Anti-Zionist, antisemitic

Anti-Zionists claim the moral high-ground and often take great offense at any suggestion they are antisemitic. 

But that’s the amazing thing. 

We spend so much time on that debate, everyone thinks it’s just normal to say, “I don’t think Israel should exist.” Because that’s what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish homeland. It’s not more complicated than that. Anti-Zionism is the idea that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish homeland.

Jonah Goldberg, How Anti-Zionism Shrugs Off Antisemitism

Moral clarity on Gaza

Barack Obama returns to the arena: Former president Obama jetted in from Martha’s Vineyard to say one quick thing, guys: the war’s kinda Israel’s fault! Or at least, we’re all guilty here, man. Hamas is the same as you and me. I’m reactive and need to learn how to take a deep breath before writing emails; Hamas tortured children and livestreamed it. Point is, we’ve all got issues. Here’s Obama: “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” It takes two to tango. Hamas killed infants point-blank; I never replace the toilet paper roll. 

You know who’s not talking like that? My woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who went on The View to deliver a shot of moral clarity straight into Stay-at-Home America’s veins. Here’s Mrs. Clinton: “Remember, there was a cease-fire on October 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery. It did not hold because Hamas chose to break it.” Moms around the country heard that call and are gathering arms. Hillary’s been through everything, so tarnished in battle she actually became clean again. I’m. With. Her, we all bellowed.

Trendy cultural relativists like 2023-era Obama can never really believe there’s a good guy. Nothing is ever better or worse than anything else. To the cultural relativists, Hamas is just another modern dance—a wild and beautiful expression of the human condition. The old-school feminists like Hilz are not so easily taken. They cut their teeth on brass tacks. They spend Saturday night preparing for the Model UN Conference, where they will crush. It does not take two to tango in the mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nellie Bowles

Abortion

Abortion in perspective: politique and mystique

The string of political losses since Dobbs overturned Roe has some thoughtful Christian conservatives reconsidering — and a few suggesting that their past writings have been vindicated:

Several years ago Matthew Lee Anderson wrote in these pages that there is no pro-life case for Donald Trump …:

If abortions happen because of the breakdown of marriage, then there is nothing ‘pro-life’ about electing someone who is at best a serial monogamist. If the abortion culture has anything to do with the wider degradation of our society’s sex and morals — as pro-lifers have argued it does for as long as I have been alive — then there is nothing pro-life in endorsing a candidate who has bragged about the number of his sexual partners. It matters that Trump is unwilling to answer whether he personally has funded abortions. It matters a great deal.

Let me be as explicit as possible about what pro-lifers supporting Trump means: It means lending their aid to someone who (with Bill Clinton) was friends with Jeffrey Epstein who was eventually convicted of pedophilia. And Trump knew of it and commended Epstein. I mean, look at this glowing endorsement: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Think about that for a second: Conservative evangelicals and other pro-lifers have rushed to find any justification they can think of to vote for a fellow who almost certainly knew of pedophilia occurring, and, for all we do know of him, did nothing to prevent it. At the very least, he was not the one who went to the police about it. That pro-lifers have been reduced to this beguiles the mind, to put it gently.

…

As long as our laws allow for the killing of the unborn we cannot claim to be such a society. But the erasure of such laws will not, in itself, absolve us of the charge of being a society that is deeply inhumane and hostile to life.

…

[T]his is what makes the embrace of Trump as a pro-life champion so damaging to the movement: It … diminishes the goals of the pro-life movement, reducing them from the lofty and inspiring ideal of creating a society hospitable to life down [mystique]to simply overturning a badly argued Supreme Court ruling [politique]. And by reducing the ideal in this way it actually drains the life from the pro-life movement, rendering it equivalent to any other political advocacy group whose sole objective is narrowly political in nature.

…

To secure an admittedly significant political victory the pro-life movement has had to give up this broader vision, for how can you credibly claim to resist the culture of death when your champion is Donald Trump?

Of course, that may be precisely the point. There may be no eulogy more fitting for American Christian conservatism than this: That we secured our continued relevance in American society by giving up the things that might have made us a distinctive society ourselves. We have gained a political victory but even if we triumph, what will we have to say? And can we say any of it with even a modicum of credibility?

Jake Meador, The Mystique of the Pro-Life Movement: On Trump & the March for Life, a reprint from January 24, 2020.

Why Abortion is a losing issue for the GOP

In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview … Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

David French

(Note the congruence of these two perspectives.)

Culture

Liberal democracy’s tacit orthodoxy

Liberal democracy has created its own orthodoxy, which causes it to become less of a forum for articulating positions and agreeing on actions than—to a much higher extent—a political mechanism for the selection of people, organizations, and ideas in line with the orthodoxy. This phenomenon can be seen especially in Europe, where in the past few decades there has been a major ideological rapprochement of the right-and left-wing parties. This resulted in the formation of what is called “the political mainstream,” which includes Socialists, Christian Democrats, the Greens, Social Democrats, Liberals, and even Conservatives. The mainstream that runs in Europe today is tilted far more to the left than to the right. Within it, the left has made a slight shift to the right in some matters (mostly economic) and made a further move to the left in other matters (mainly moral), while the right-wing movement’s shift to the left was huge.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Bittersweet resolution of nostalgia

(James Matthew Wilson ached for Michigan during his long exile:)

We had chosen a difficult time to return. Michigan had legalized recreational marijuana use in 2018, and cannabis shops had sprung up all over the place, with their ridiculous names and vulgar slogans appearing on billboards along the highways. The whole state has been defaced with bad puns on words like “high” and “stoned.” And in 2022, the citizens of the state voted to lock abortion rights into the state constitution. It also elected its first Democratic legislature in forty years, and in the short time that coalition has been in power, it has pushed through a slew of left-leaning programs that will further erode the moral and educational standards of the place—all done, ironically, in hopes of luring new residents to the state. Michigan risks becoming a state where the slaughter of the innocent and the drugging of citizens into inertia and schizophrenia are celebrated as pastimes. Its governor proudly speaks of these things as part of a golden vision of the future, alongside the construction of a new Chinese-owned plant for electric vehicle batteries.

These changes have given my family occasion to see why the love of country, the piety of Virgil, is so essential. When one feels betrayed or disappointed—or wounded by the legal establishment of grave evil—the loving reaction is not to withdraw but to abide, to recommit oneself to the saving of what risks being lost. “It is good that you exist!” Love sees through the faults and perversions of the hour. It stands firm, when other kinds of commitment or affection would crumble. This kind of love has to be wound about the bone and deep within the sinew, just as its vision of the object loved is not subject to present appearances. Our truest loves are not universalizing, free, and deliberate, but stubborn, unaccountable, and particular. We do not love immutability, eternity, or omniscience. We yearn to see God’s face, which we find in the human countenance of Jesus. The same holds for natural pieties, especially love of one’s home.

I have a favorite Michigan vacation destination, Traverse City, and agree with him on the “ridiculous names and vulgar [marijuana] slogans.”

What happened to the ACLU

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York City’s Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers’ side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own “reproductive rights” division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organization’s social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse “was not held responsible for his actions.” In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled “ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities” formalized the end of the old era. Due to “limited resources” and the ACLU’s need “to recruit and retain a diverse staff,” its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose “views are contrary to our values.” Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were “the potential effect on marginalized communities” and the “harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.”

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing “woke” lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

Helen Andrews, What Happened to the ACLU

Things at hand

Now if it is my inclination to tune out the national news, or if I claim that being obsessed with it is a sign not of engagement in the world but of a pathological boredom with it, I do so because I believe that, by comparison, what’s “at hand” is far more important. And I leave aside asking whether there are no Shakespeare plays or sonnets or Melville novels we haven’t read yet that we could go and read instead of glutting our boredom on Fox and CNN. Are we really going to surrender our attention to what the precious twenty-somethings on NPR believe we should care about when we ourselves can take charge of our own attention and attending?

…

I am not suggesting that anyone abstain from voting in presidential elections, though I confess to having abstained on grounds that seem perfectly reasonable to me: I didn’t want to be implicated in the shenanigans of either of the clowns on offer. But what I am saying is that there are duties of citizenship confronting us not once every four years but every day. And those who account themselves citizens because they vote in abstract elections but cannot be bothered by the “things at hand” are, in my view, not citizens in any sense of the word. They are people sitting on their couches watching the Super Bowl or the Election News, elbow deep in Cheeze Doodles, too busy being consumers of far-away news or sports to be citizens of the near-at-hand—citizens performing, at scale, the offices of neighbor.

Jason Peters, in an essay well worth a few minutes, Citizens of the Things at Hand.

Why is such advice so hard to follow?

Politics

Long-term consquences of Trumpism

One of the many tragedies of this era for the American right is how Trump and Trumpism have consumed young Republican political talent.

The most promising young governor in the party is being steamrolled in this year’s presidential primary, a casualty of Trump’s hubris and ambition. He may never recover from the ridicule he’s endured for his “disloyalty.”

Successful young(-ish) governors like Chris Sununu and Doug Ducey are either out of politics or soon will be, despite how formidable they’d be as Senate candidates. They ran afoul of Trump and therefore would struggle to get through a primary, so they’ve decided not to bother.

Smart young conservatives like Elise Stefanik converted to Trumpism for the same reason, to not run afoul of him or his voters. There’s little left to distinguish phony, opportunistic populists like Stefanik from true believers like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re rubber stamps for Trump in equal measure; the only difference is that one mutters sotto voce while doing the stamping.

Right-wing political stars now tend to be made from charismatic charlatans who are good on television, in the image of the party’s leader, not from policy mavens. Kari Lake and Vivek Ramaswamy are better known than most Republican officeholders despite never having won an election.

The closest thing Trumpism has to a next-gen political success story is J.D. Vance in Ohio. In unguarded moments, Vance sounds like a fascist.

That’s a lot of political capital that Republicans have spoiled or squandered.

Nick Cataggio

Our libertarian land

Ross Douthat

I don’t find this surprising at all. I think America is a pro-choice, pro-pot, and pro-gun society. I think the legalization of marijuana in Ohio is going to be a total disaster. But I think social conservatism is largely correct, and unfortunately, fairly unpopular, and that’s bad for the country. But such is life.

Michelle Cottle

Such is a democracy. So you’re saying you believe in thermostatic voting, more or less.

Ross Douthat

I think that America has shifted meaningfully to the individualist left on a range of, quote unquote, “social issues” over the last 20 years, including not just issues about sex and reproduction, but also issues like marijuana.

And I think guns falls into this category. One reason I think the liberals lose on guns in certain ways for the same reason maybe pro-lifers lose on abortion, where if you poll people about specific gun control provisions, they might support them, but they don’t trust Democrats because they think Democrats want to take away their guns. And in the same way, I think it might be that people who would support a 12-week abortion ban in theory don’t trust Republicans to implement it because they think Republicans want to just ban all abortions. I think there may be similar dynamics in play there, in a very libertarian country.

New York Times

Don’t say he didn’t tell us

“If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” – likely future president Donald Trump, to Univision.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Humpty Elon

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, via Goodreads.

We tweeted a line from Louise Perry’s remarkable essay, “We Are Repaganizing” (October 2023): “Abortion is not just ‘healthcare’; it is not at all like getting a tooth or a tonsil removed.” When we turned to promote the tweet as part of an X Ads campaign, the Ministry of Truth at X (formerly known as Twitter) informed us that the ad would not run. Its communication specified a violation of a policy that prohibits the promotion of health and pharmaceutical products and services. But the thrust of Louise’s observation is analytical, not promotional. It concerns what abortion is. Welcome to the Free Society™, brought to you by Silicon Valley. (Via First Things)

When we apply a rule, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less. The question is who is to be master — that’s all.

Living your faith

For me, faith is about uniting all people. It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who won re-election November 7, via E.J. Dionne and David Brooks.

If divine law and human reason condemn hatred of anyone who is “Other” simply because of who he or she is, then even more so do they condemn the irrational and too-often lethal hatred of the People to whom God first made his promises—promises, the Second Vatican Council taught, of which God has never repented (see Nostra Aetate 4). Jew-hatred that leads to cries of “Kill the Jews!” and “Gas the Jews!” is as clear an example of a deliberate choice that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible” as one can imagine. It is loathsome. It is a gangrenous wound eating away at everything from higher education to politics. It cannot be tolerated, and those who advocate such barbarities should not be tolerated either. 

For Christians to engage in any form of anti-Semitism is to add further blows to the smitten back of Christ, tied to the Pillar of Flagellation. It is to press more thorns upon his bleeding brow. It is to pound more nails into his hands and feet. It is to thrust another spear into his side. For he was and is, eternally, the Son of David as well as the Son of God, and to scorn his kinsmen is to scorn him.

George Weigel

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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

Friday, 10/6/23

The Culture Generally

Ninth Commandment, RIP

The Ninth Commandment is dead. People think nothing of spouting completely crazy stuff as gospel truth. Conspiracy Theories Spread Online About FEMA Emergency Alert Test: Some say it will trigger reactions among vaccinated individuals

Banned Book B.S.

The attacks are the work of a minuscule minority of conservatives. When The Washington Post analyzed 986 complaints against specific books filed during the 2021-2022 school year, it found that the majority were issued by the same 11 people. (You read that right. 11.) Across the red states, hundreds of popular titles have been removed from public school and community libraries, in many cases on the basis of a single complaint.

Margaret Renkl

When a book is removed because of a single complaint from one full-time U.S. Crackpot Laureate, I blame the administration — not America, not even the crackpot. It’s almost as if they want to gin up another yarn for Banned Book Week, knowing that the press will overlook the pussilanimity and label complaints “terror campaigns” (as Renkl did).

Am I wrong?

Performing malady

Today, people perform trauma. They perform trauma because they’re rewarded for doing so with attention and sympathy. The desire to get those things is natural; the incentive structure that produces that behavior is toxic. The social assumptions that once pushed people to valorize being healthy, which we now often dismiss as “stigma,” have no purchase in online communities like TikTok, Tumblr, or Instagram. What has great purchase is presenting a comprehensible identity to others, a vision of a self made legible by some simplistic and overarching factor.

…

It’s a basic fact of human life in the digitally-connected era: when a discourse gets empowered, in some way, it will be abused. We’re just now starting to count all of the ways that the discourse of racial justice and LGBTQ rights and feminism and related concepts have been weaponized and misused, invoked in bad faith to destructive ends. People found that when they invoked those discourses, others were often unwilling to push back, for fear of being branded racist, or sexist, or homophobic, etc. We had created an incentive structure, and people responded to those incentives. And we have now spent years and years living in the consequences of that scenario – freed from any responsibility to truth or sense or pragmatism by their cloak of social justice, a lot of hucksters have carved out careers of influence and reward, while bad ideas have proliferated due to the lack of an appropriately skeptical environment. Perhaps things have recently begun to thaw, but it will take time to tell.

Freddie de Boer.

Not enough models available

When people obsess over the college pipeline, they do so because they think that college can turn everybody into a busy little meritocrat, the kind who go on to get jobs at Google or a SLAC or the Ford Foundation or the Department of the Interior. But the high school excellence to college to enviable PMC employment cycle depends on a level of natural intellectual talent, plus the ability to delay gratification and keep to a schedule etc., that many people don’t have. So we need other models ….

Freddie de Boer

Aspirations for our children

I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Henry Adams, via David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Children? What children?

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Politics

Taking sides

Do you take “sides” or do you have “positions”? For the good of democracy, William Deresiewicz hopes it’s the latter. “‘Side’ carries with it an entire worldview; it tells us how to think and feel,” he writes for Persuasion. “As soon as you say ‘side,’ you’re saying there are only two: the right one and the wrong one, us versus them, good versus evil. ‘Positions’ involves a very different set of practices than ‘sides.’ ‘Sides’ goes with debates, where each party tries to ‘win,’ to show that they are ‘right,’ by bashing away at the other. At best you might decide the truth lies somewhere ‘in the middle.’ ‘Positions’ goes with conversations. You listen; you acknowledge doubt; you think out loud; you learn. You both learn. You discover things together neither of you would have come to on your own. You might meet in the middle, but you’re as likely to decide that the truth, or at least your next best approximation of the truth, lies somewhere else altogether—in a different direction, or another dimension. And you can do all this because the stakes aren’t existential anymore. Your identity—as a member of your ‘side’—is no longer riding on the outcome. You can breathe. You can think.”

Via The Morning Dispatch

Captured by false dichotomies

On a related note:

The foundations of our political consensus are eroding. The establishment is noticing. Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood dwells on the influence of Bronze Age Pervert, a transgressive internet personality. For a moment, though, Wood surveys a wider scene. He recognizes that Bronze Age Pervert’s antics can so transfix us that we fail to see something real happening among bright and normal young people. Here’s what Wood observes on the basis of an exchange between Yale professor Bryan Garsten and First Things contributor Matthew Rose:

Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues [in response to a paper by Rose, later published in First Things as “Leo Strauss and the Closed Society,” December 2022] that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.

In my experience, the choices are not so stark. Most young people whom I meet are not interested in protofascist or quasi-theocratic options. But they do express doubts about the present regime. This is because they are not stupid. They can see that the regime is quick to speak of “our democracy,” but works to censor and control our lives, even our use of pronouns. I regard Bronze Age Pervert as a symptom (a minor one), not a cause. The source of growing dissent from our illiberal liberal regime rests in its failures, which are masked by self-serving propaganda and tactics of intimidation.

R.R. Reno

Progress against Porn

More Reno:

On a number of occasions I’ve lamented that our leaders have done nothing to stem the surging tide of pornography on the web. A friend recently told me that I’m behind the times. In 2022 Louisiana State Representative Laurie Schlegel introduced legislation requiring websites that host pornography to “perform reasonable age verification methods.” In effect, those wishing to access pornography need to show government-issued ID in one or another electronic form. The bill passed the Louisiana House by a vote of 96–1 and the State Senate by a vote of 34–0. Similar legislation has been enacted in Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. The effects have been dramatic, and not only where underage users are concerned. Not surprisingly, adults who are legally entitled to view pornography aren’t keen to upload screenshots of their driver’s licenses onto pornography websites. One source reports that Pornhub, the biggest global company in the porn industry, has suffered an 80-percent drop in traffic in Louisiana. Pornhub has stopped operating in Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia. As an industry representative observed, age verification requirements are “business-killing.” More states have legislation pending.

(Yes, two Reno quotes means I’m belatedly reading the current First Things. I no longer rejoice on its arrival, but rather sigh. I’m not sure I’ll renew, although I think I’m a charter subscriber, as Richard John Neuhaus moved from the Rockford Institute to this new publication. It has gradually changed under Reno, then more rapidly changed under Trump-Reno. The ratio of religion to politics was way out of kilter in this issue especially.)

Cui bono?

I’m suspicious of the congealing conventional wisdom that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do more damage to Donald Trump as a third-party candidate than to Joe Biden.

Even though some of its proponents, like our own Chris Stirewalt, have forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know.

What makes me suspicious is the delight I take in the prospect. I don’t care how Trump ends up losing so long as he loses, but to have him lose because a far-left nut ended up stealing the right-wing crank vote from him would be sweet beyond words. Live by the conspiracy theory, die by the conspiracy theory.

Nick Cattogio

Your Guide to the New Right

Your Guide to the New Right, the current Ezra Klein podcast (guest-hosted by David French) is very, very good. Guest Stephanie Slade really knows her stuff (or is faking it well enough to fool me — one who has spent too much time reading about the new right antics, so appalled am I by the disappearance of conservatism).

Gerontocracy and Gaetz

The basic gerontocratic fiscal trap is easy to describe: As societies grow older, with longer life expectancies and fewer kids, their old-age commitments become steadily more costly even as the share of voters who benefit from those commitments (and turn out to vote) increases. This makes it harder to fix fiscal problems, and it makes the path of least political resistance the protection of the old and the shortchanging of the young — who, thus shortchanged, start fewer families and deepen societal senescence.

But there is a further twist in American politics, which is that the party that would normally be the ideological vehicle for resisting the drift into gerontocratic stasis — the party of free markets and limited government — is also increasingly dependent on the votes of culturally conservative older voters. Which makes it especially politically challenging, even self-undermining, to actually undertake the kind of fiscal reforms that the right’s philosophy officially supports.

Ross Douthat, How Gerontocracy Explains the Matt Gaetz Clown Show

Many people have been commenting on this, so perhaps it’s even better than I thought.

Trump

Winning, but dysfunctionally

In the 2022 elections,

Democrats had lost the majority, but Republicans had not won a functioning majority of their own.

They tried to act otherwise. They tried to advance a big agenda, even tried to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. To propel that agenda required their tiny majority to march in unison, each member subordinating his or her own wishes to the collective will.

Predictably, that did not happen.

Which left Plan B: Accept reality; acknowledge that the GOP had not won a functioning majority; and reach across the aisle, make deals, and do your business that way.

That’s what McCarthy did in May with the debt-ceiling deal and tried to do again with the budget this past weekend. The first foray wounded him. The second finished him.

The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it hard to accept reality. Reality is just too awkward.

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. …

…

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

David Frum, The Republican Delusion Machine

Sir Thomas More lives!

I consider Matt Gaetz to be a maliciously cynical lawmaker, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see McCarthy deposed. After all, he has been a key figure in transforming the GOP into a monstrous political party, one whose contempt for constitutional and democratic norms poses the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War.

…

McCarthy was careful never to get crosswise of Trump, aware of what a dominant figure Trump is within the Republican Party. McCarthy has been so obeisant to Trump—a lawless, cruel, and uniquely destructive figure—that Trump once referred to him as “my Kevin.”

…

McCarthy also did something unprecedented, campaigning in his role as speaker in a primary against a sitting incumbent in his own party, Liz Cheney, a one-time ally and member of his leadership team. Cheney’s sin? She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol; she served as vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack; and she continued to call out Trump’s lies about the election being stolen. Cheney acted honorably, placing country above party. She put her political career at risk in order to defend the Constitution. And that was simply too much for “my Kevin.”

…

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More has an exchange with Richard Rich, an ambitious young man whom More, early in the play, warns against getting into politics. Rich doesn’t possess the moral fortitude to resist the temptations that accompany a political life. It isn’t so much that Rich is bad; it’s that he’s weak.

Rich eventually betrays More, and in one of the play’s most famous lines, More tells Rich, “Why, Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!”

Kevin McCarthy gave up his soul not for Wales but for something worse—Donald Trump. It will be of little comfort to McCarthy to know that he’s hardly the only one to have done so.

Peter Wehner, The Revolution Devours Kevin McCarthy

Wordplay

Plogging

A combination of jogging and picking up trash. It’s becoming a competitive sport, with a world championship scheduled.

(H/T WSJ)

Snaffle

to take something quickly for yourself, in a way that prevents someone else from having or using it.

Cambridge Dictionary.

So, if the Dutch gain a financial advantage through public debt, joint stock companies, and South Asian trade, then the English can simply snaffle their ideas.

Remaking the World page 237.

Idyllic

Wikimedia Commons

Yeah. Maybe that’s cheating. But I loved the photo and wanted to share it.

bland ambition

Ross Douthat’s characterization of the fallen Speaker Kevin McCarthy

Romanticizing the past

“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

Paul Kingsnorth

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

David French

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

Tonite’s debates

I rarely post twice in a day, but these items have a sell-by date of 8/23.

GOP Presidential Preferences

Republican voters no longer want to elect professional politicians to the presidency. Sure, they like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis well enough. They think he’s a good guy. Maybe they’d like to see him put in charge of Health and Human Services during the next Trump administration. But he’s a pol—and because he’s a pol, they don’t particularly trust him. The person they trust is Trump—more than they do their pastors, more than they do conservative media figures, and even more than they do their own friends and family. They certainly don’t trust the normie politicians fighting over scraps at the bottom of GOP primary tracking polls. You know, the people who will be debating in Milwaukee tomorrow night.

If I ran the debate …

Thank you all for being here. It is weird not to have the frontrunner here, of course. But, then, it’s a little weird that the frontrunner is the guy who lost last time around and then tried to overthrow the government.

Which brings us to our first question: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

I’d like to remind you that those electrodes attached to your … are we allowed to say that on television? … are hooked up to our state-of-the-art Acme B.S. Detector. And thanks to our sponsors at Acme B.S. Detectors! On the other side of that circuit is a Duralast Platinum AGM Battery boasting 750 cold-cranking amps—and thanks to our other sponsors at AutoZone! You know the drill: We have Mitch Daniels standing by with the controls in hand, and, if you try to wholesale the kind of bull you normally feed gullible Republican primary voters and fawning Fox News types to our audience, then it is ZAP! right in the ’nads.

…

Mr. Pence, when the administration in which you served attempted to overturn the 2020 election in a coup d’état under color of law, you did your constitutional duty and certified the electors. And for about 48 hours, you were pretty critical of Donald Trump. Well done! By my calculation, that means you conducted yourself honorably for about 0.14 percent of the four years in question with the guy you now call your “former running mate.” Don’t you think there should be a kind of time-out or something? I know you’re an evangelical, but you are also a baptized Catholic. Couldn’t you—shouldn’t you—go to a monastery for like 20 years or something?

…

Okay, so let me get this straight: If police shoot Walter Scott in the back, it’s Walter Scott’s fault, somehow, and cops have a really hard job. But if a “patriot” is barricaded in his house pointing a rifle at federal agents there to serve a lawful arrest warrant and somebody gets dead, that is … Chris Wray’s fault? Help me understand this one.

Excerpts from the GOP Presidential debate Kevin D. Williamson would moderate if only we’d let him.

You could read Kevin D. Williamson all the time if you subscribed to The Dispatch.

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

Wednesday, 8/23/23

Culture

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society. 

Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.

So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community ….

Sebastian Morello, Libertarian ‘Conservatism’: A Trojan Horse

Countering the Zeitgeist

I don’t often recommend poetry, but Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, caught my ear in a podcast reading, and is notable in the context of Illich for its call to humbler ambitions.

Segregated sports

I had no idea that chess routinely holds separate men’s and women’s competitions, and that the women overall are objectively worse than men. See Frank Haviland, Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians for a fascinating and possibly illuminating treatment. I’m still scratching my head.

Striking

General Carrera Lake, Chile, via Prufrock

Legalia

Neutral laws of general applicability

Since Employment Division v. Smith in the early 1990s, we’ve been living under a constitutional regime which, viewed from a galloping horse, looks quite a bit less favorable than prior law for religious exemptions from some laws. So long as a law is neutral and generally applicable, one isn’t entitled to a religious exemption however strong one’s beliefs or weak the governmental interest in making the law.

But when you slow down and look closer, the concept of “neutral laws of general applicability” keeps tripping up rulemakers, as they keep creating loopholes for some but not for none. Sometimes, the loophole is as big as “we can make exceptions case-by-case.” In others, it’s gerrymandering the law to target a disfavored religious practice, as when Hialeah Florida tried to hobble the animal sacrifices of Santeria while permitting Kosher slaughter.

So I was gratified to see the religion-friendly ending to a case I’ve watched, on and off, since its 2017 beginning, Country Mill Farms, LLC. V. City of East Lansing, where the City of East Lansing excluded Country Mill Farms from its farmers market because it refused, at its own facility, to host same-sex weddings. Click the link for Euguene Volokh’s fuller description.

Politics

My Man Mitch strikes again

We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts.

Mitch Daniels in the Washington Post via TMD

“Vote fraud” was pre-baked into Trump’s cake

The most interesting act out of the 126 acts laid out in the indictment is the first one. It reads:

On or about the 4th day of November 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP made a nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election. Approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual 1, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The most significant claim here is that Trump always planned to cry, “Fraud!” if he lost regardless of the evidence. This is not a shocking revelation, given that he has a long history of preemptively saying that the only way he might lose anything is if his opponents cheated or rigged the game.

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise

The Truthiness of Trump

More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.

(CBS News, Emphasis added). “True information”! Words have lost all meaning!

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

247 and counting

Politics

Trump

Lies and lies

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

Nick Cattogio

Grifts

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

Chris Christie

Some countries work differently

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

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

Oafs

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

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

J Budziszewski, Elites, Deplorables, and Political Style

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

Cultural

Renaissance men (and women)

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

Dietary dogma

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Unseemly Modesty

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

TMD

Bracing:

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

Feminisms

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

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

Legal

Freedom from compelled speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(italics added)

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

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

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

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

Quoted in TMD

Student Loan forgiveness

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

TMD

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

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

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

There ought be a law

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

Prufrock

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

Political, but not partisan

Reiterating, I had collected so much material that I’m breaking it up topically. I can’t certify zero partisanship, express or implied, in what follows. Just remember that I’ve never been a Democrat and I’m almost over all my Republican reflexes.

Gobsmacked?

Who is the most pro-life president in modern American history?

Many of Donald Trump’s defenders say that it’s him. The proof, they say, is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization …

But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency.

…

No president saw sharper decreases in the abortion rate and ratio from the first to the last year of his presidency than Barack Obama. In 2016, at the end of a presidency dominated by pro-choice policies and judicial nominations, there were a total of 874,080 abortions — 338,270 fewer than there were in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush presidency.

…

[E]ven before Roe was overturned, I was under no illusions about the challenge facing the pro-life movement. That challenge is now proving worse even than I feared, and it’s worse in part because of the very compromises made to secure the Dobbs victory. The pro-life movement was Donald Trump’s mighty political vehicle. Without its support, his cruelty, malice and corruption would be a footnote to history.

Instead, his towering presence has warped almost a full decade of American life, turned Americans against Americans and transformed the culture of the Republican Party, the political home of pro-life America. It remains to be seen how long his malign influence will last. But much of America has experienced Trump’s presence on the public stage as a form of assault, and that assault is ultimately antithetical to the cause of life.

…

A pro-life movement that has long affixed its eyes on power must now remember hope. Otherwise, it may remember this period of American history as the time when it won the law and lost the nation, when the means of its legal triumph also sowed the seeds of its cultural defeat. If there is one thing that we know, it is that the culture in which we live decisively influences whether men and women possess the hope sufficient to have a child.

David French. In fairness to French, I realize that my excerpts may be slightly more negative toward Trump than his essay was.

In any event, for a 43-year pro-life veteran like me, the raw facts are challenging, and they’ve earned this French essay a flag to remind me to read it again.

The emigration of the Left

Leftists used to see themselves as champions of the poor and working classes. They viewed government as a means to protect and provide for the economically vulnerable. They wanted to rein in the power of the rich, and to ensure a decent life for the ordinary working man and his family.

This was a winning political message for the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors, even though the reality fell short of the promises. As those on the right pointed out, big government has inefficiencies, injustices, oppression, and corruption of its own. Nonetheless, conservatives are not opposed to all government welfare and regulation, and we can recognize some virtues in the left’s old economic vision, even if we remain skeptical of big government’s ability to achieve it.

The left used to dream of economic and social solidarity. Then sex broke the left. The sexual revolution suddenly had the left talking like the most radical individualists imaginable; solidarity, commitment, and obligations were abandoned if they got in the way of pursuing a good time in bed or pursuing the next romantic relationship.

…

The heart of today’s Democratic Party isn’t the union hall, but white-collar professionals with pride flags in their Twitter profiles. This class is eager to pressure everyone else into accepting their social views, especially as regards the rainbow agenda. Hence the order to take food from poor children to force schools to adhere to the whims of LGBT activists.

Nathanael Blake, The Left Prioritizes Sex Over Solidarity, With Tragic Consequences

I do not ordinarily visit The Federalist, which I hasten to say is unrelated to The Federalist Society. Thursday’s “front page above the fold” gives you a sampling of the unsavory flavor:

But this article was linked within another I was reading — and the description of “leftists” and Democrats seems fundamentally accurate. Further, there’s at least smoke if not fire behind that last sentence.

I feel bad that I had to learn of this story by coincidence, but I’m too likely to end up utterly frantic and unhinged if I regularly dumpster-dive for the odd bit of edible news. (I could name names, but I won’t. Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not expected to publish every day in order to keep myself and my wife fed.) Isn’t it enough to know that our general national trajectory is very bad without obsessing over every scrap of supporting evidence, Left and Right?

The prime directive of any bureaucracy

Title Nine of the 1972 Education Act was straightforward, and answered perfectly well to a democratic consensus of the time: educational institutions should not discriminate based on sex. As in “you’re a woman, you can’t attend this school.” The object of its control was institutions. But the powers said to emanate from Title Nine not only expanded, they became different in kind. Its object of control is now students: universities, as franchisees of the federal government, must now manage student’ sexual relations with one another. This transformation has taken place outside the legislative process, where it would be subject to democratic pressures (and hence common opinion), and has instead been internal to the federal rule-making apparatus.

Universities, in turn, tend to interpret the rules according to the timeless institutional principle of maximum ass-covering, which lines up nicely with the prime directive of any bureaucracy: it must expand, like a shark that must keep moving or die.

Matthew B. Crawford, The illegitimacy of the male

Don’t let a lucrative cause end just because you won

The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.

Andrew Sullivan, at a Human Rights Campaign Fundraiser before Obergefell decreed same-sex marriage throughout the land. But the HRC continued, shifting its attention to grifting for every plausible and some implausible demands of sexual minorities — er, excuse me, gender minorities, or something.

The craziest thing is that these grifters still have the respectful ears of our adult “influencers.”

In Vibetown, it always made sense

One of the three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who came down with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 was Ben Hu, who worked on the project that received U.S. funding. This was first reported by our friends at Public, then confirmed in The Wall Street Journal. 

Yes, a U.S. taxpayer-funded project. So the U.S. intelligence communities knew what was happening and why from the start. If Public and The WSJ are right, the scandal now is the cover-up. Here’s Alina Chan, who works with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and wrote a book on Covid’s origins: “When I first heard the names of the sick WIV researchers, I was in disbelief that people in the US [government] knew about this and yet allowed the public to listen to media stories about pangolins and raccoon dogs for literally years. . . . The most shocking part of this story is that it took 3.5 years for this intel to be shared with the public.”

In retrospect, there were early signs that it was a U.S. government cover-up, not a Chinese one. Only an American would know that our media is so malleable that indeed we can be told Chinese-people-eating-crazy-shit-again is the anti-racist origin story. Yes, the classic not racist explanation: the Chinese love of diseased pangolin flesh is what killed your grandma. A research lab with sloppy security? That’s called racism. Chinese officials would never concoct this PR scheme on their own because it’s insane. But you see: it’s insane in a world of logic. Not in vibes, where we live. In Vibetown, it always made sense. 

Nellie Bowles at the Free Press. I almost let my subscription lapse last Monday, because I’m only reading a third to a half of their daily articles, but then thought better of it. That their interests are broader than mine doesn’t mean they’re not interesting when the stars are in alignment.

Anyway, I don’t actually remember whether “I told you so,” about Fauci, but I never believed his denial of U.S. funding for gain-of-function research. I’m pretty sure that the proof he was lying (not just equivocating with weasel-words) was revealed almost immediately.

If you live where the government regularly lies to you but isn’t consistently good at suppressing refutations of its lies, are you living in a “free country” or a “democracy”?

The new education rhetoric

Here’s a great example of the new education rhetoric: “The far right’s effort to take over schools is not limited to battlegrounds or red states—they just won 40% of the elected education roles in NYC,” writes Amanda Litman, a prominent education activist, literally just describing parents who are pro–standardized testing. 

It turns out that closing schools for years was really bad. And schools deciding that math and reading are right-wing didn’t help. And weirdly, teachers becoming quasi-religious figures primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores. You know why? Those are my jobs. Yes, all of these tasks used to be the role of the lesbian aunt. It was my job to say math class is trash; Howard Zinn does it better; and Doc Martens are a good shoe that will last you years. It was me who was meant to paint your son’s nails. ME.

Nellie Bowles

How and in what sense has the Right become authoritarian?

I don’t think our most fundamental problem is that one of our two parties wants to establish one-party authoritarian rule. Our most fundamental problem is that we disagree very deeply about what kind of country we should be, and that disagreement is also very narrow, meaning that which direction we will go is maximally unsettled …

As far as I’m concerned, the primary thing that has made the right more dangerous than the left through this period is that, thanks to Donald Trump and voters most devoted to him, the right now actively indulges in fantasies, delusions, and conspiratorial thinking that convince it that it’s more popular than it really is, that the left has rigged the system in its favor, and that these acts of cheating by the left require truth-defying acts of rule-bending and rule-breaking in order for the right to prevail.

That is how the right gets to nascent authoritarianism ….

Damon Linker

What some American conservatives see in Putin

How were the large animals initially domesticated? I really like the theory that ancient people used the same trick modern hunters use—salt traps. They would give animals salt (which they need badly), so they have to come. Even husbandry has an element of bribe and negotiation. … You need to give people what they want. Now what do they want? That’s usually very simple to understand, they won’t shut up about it. They may express it indirectly through projections though. … Western right wings desire a great Christian conservative power which will save them from the wokes. They dream about it day and night. …  they project their need to the nearest available candidate—Vladimir Putin, viewing him as a parental figure.

John Lamont, Russian Philosopher Aleksandr Dugin: Defender of Traditional Values or Dangerous Occultist?.

Considering how flawed and dishonest virtually all politicians are, I once flirted with the possibility that Putin was a flawed, dishonest and sometimes murderous Christian conservative, so I know that Lamont is at least in the ballpark on this.

The real problem with corporate tax cuts

One way of talking about tax cuts, for example, is that they’re a bad economic policy solution to the real problems that we face. But another is that they’re a way of giving money to our enemies as conservatives. Do we really want to keep on fueling the people who are funding institutions, organizations, and ideas that we find abhorrent?

My answer to that is, obviously, no. So despite the fact that I don’t think tax cuts are great economic policy, I think they’re most stupid because they’re empowering our political enemies and we should stop doing that.

J.D. Vance via American Compass

In 20 seconds or less: why Ramaswamy?

He can make 16 arguments in the time it takes Joe Biden to wander through a sentence and Kamala Harris to butcher a paragraph.

Ross Douthat’s hypothetical elevator pitch for Vivek Ramaswamy

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

Friday, 5/12/23

Wordplay

(Let’s start with something pleasant.)

  • Murmur. An onomatopoeia that fascinates me because the Bible is chock-full of murmuring and murmurers.
  • Augur and inaugurate
  • Casserolades: concerts of banging pots and pans to signify political discontent. This seems to be a uniquely French thing. The demonstrators are called ‌casseroleurs.
  • Womb envy: [The envy that men may (or is it “allegedly”?) feel of the biological functions of the female. Contemporary womb-enviers are said to be prominent among those technicians making lavish claims of sentience for (misnamed) Artificial Intelligence. “It’s only natural that computer scientists long to create A.I. and realize a long-held dream.” (Jaron Lanier) (Side note: I guess it’s okay to recognize sexual dimorphism when the point it to belittle males.)
  • An ambient expectation of human subservience. The unarticulated requirement that humans do more and more common tasks in the manner required by digital designs. (Synthesized from the context of Jaron Lanier’s use of the term in There Is No A.I.)
  • A sensational scoop was tweeted last month by America’s National Public Radio: Elon Musk’s “massive space sex rocket” had exploded on launch. Alas, it turned out to be an automated mistranscription of SpaceX, the billionaire’s rocketry firm. (From the Economist, I believe.)

I’m glad a stuck around for Frank Bruni’s “For the Love of Sentences” after he commented on CNN’s Town Hall featuring DJT. Some gems through Bruni:

  • One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts … It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians. (Helen Lewis)
  • The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility. (Rachel Tashjian)
  • Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures. (Tom Holland)

Not Trump

(We now inch toward truly unpleasant truths, albeit colorfully expressed.)

The source of aesthetics, ethics (and folly)

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “core generator” of insights.

Garrison Keillor, scab?

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

Why I am not joining the strike | Garrison Keillor

Hell will be paid

The transgender movement now wields tremendous power, and many children are being transitioned long before they reach their teen years. They are being put on puberty blockers and going under the knife before they are old enough to vote, drink, or drive. Many will wake up one day and realize that their ability to conceive children and experience sexual pleasure was destroyed by the adult ideologues that they trusted.

Jonathon Van Maren, Life After Detransition.

I’d look forward to the malpractice judgments against the ideologues and profiteers were it not that every such judgment is inadequate redress for the kinds of harm they cause.

Professional Human Losers

I have a cyber-acquaintance (I was well aware of him even before cyberspace, though), Alan Jacobs, who’s something of a Christian Public Intellectual — a dying breed as he noted in a Harpers article a few years back. One of Jacobs’ muses in turn is Austin Kleon, whose postings he frequently shares, and at which I frequently yawn. That probably means I’m a shallow person — or that my brain and Jacobs feed on different things.

But this one caught my fancy as it catches our moment. I’ll just say it involves, and riffs off, Jeopardy Champ (now host) Ken Jennings losing to a supercomputer.

It’s short enough that I won’t risk, by quoting an excerpt, omitting something that might edify you, whose brain may also feed on different things than mine.

Analogy?

Mortician Bonasera/Don Corleone = Harlan Crow/Clarence Thomas
True or False?

If you answered “true”, you get an A+ from Brooke Harrington.

Because the publisher is the Atlantic (and the author isn’t Adam Serwer) the article is less than 100% meritless. But Harrington gives away her guttersnipe game when (a) she views any conservative justice’s friends as suspect and (b) she reports no similar friendships of liberal justices.

But wait! There’s more!

African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Easier, yes, but the captivity of these groups to the Democratic party is independent evidence of alignment with rich white liberals.

Fomenting stochastic violence

(Getting closer to the nasties …)

The law in its majesty neutrality has decided that people on both the Left and the Right can spout incendiary lies so long as the threat of violent response is not imminent. But I think the coinage “stochastic violence” or “stochastic terrorism” is nevertheless useful, and that “random” violence is sometimes (often?) rooted in lying rhetoric (and, as in the case of the January 6 insurrection, calling it “random” is a cop-out).

Setting the stage, deploring the actors

But who, sir, makes the [slave] trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Slavery aside, we still do this: we escalate our rhetoric and then damn the actual perpetrators of such stochastic terrorism as our rhetoric invited.

Or maybe, if we’re shameless enough, we’ll call the terrorism a …

Patriot Purge

Yeah! That’s the ticket!

If you infuse an issue or set of issues with religious intensity but drain a movement of religious virtue, then profound religious conflict — including violent conflict — is the inevitable result. Indeed, we saw religious violence on full display when a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and it is no coincidence that one of Carlson’s most mendacious projects was his effort to recast the Jan. 6 insurrection and its aftermath as a “patriot purge.”

Maybe I should leave it at that, but the author has more:

The more the Christian right latches on to cruel men, the more difficult it becomes to argue that the cruelty is a bug, not a feature …

Many Christians fear that kindness doesn’t “work,” so they discard it. This is how even decency itself becomes a “secondary value.” Aggression, not virtue, becomes the touchstone of political engagement, and anything other than aggression is seen as a sign of weakness.

Both quotes from David French, Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right

As someone who cannot remember ever watching Tucker Carlson’s segment in its entirety (who hasn’t encountered clips of him?), I can’t speak of his “cruelty” or “aggression” except to say that they were nowhere near my top-line impressions. Maybe that showed up when he singled out some random click-baity schmuck for ridicule?

Trump’s court loss

(Sigh! It’s time.)

We’ll all go down together

The first rule of the modern Republican Party, it’s said, is “You can’t criticize Trump.” But that’s not correct.

The actual rule is “You can’t take sides with the left against Trump.” It just so happens that every moral objection to Trump’s character and fitness is now “coded” as leftist …

In 2023, the question of Trump’s character has become a litmus test of right-wing authenticity. To deem him unfit for office is necessarily to have been corrupted by left-wing propaganda, even if the “propaganda” in question is Trump being accused of sexual misconduct by 20+ women and then being held liable for sexual abuse in court.

This explains why so many conservatives, elected and otherwise, resorted to grumbling about the “New York jury” after yesterday’s verdict. If the jurors were a bunch of partisan blue-state hacks, as their critics insinuate, it’s passing strange that they ended up finding Trump not liable on [raping] her. But since holding him accountable for any moral failing is behavior that’s now associated exclusively with Democrats, the belief on the right that the verdict could only have been tainted by politics will be inescapable.

That dynamic conveniently makes it impossible for Trump’s fitness for office to be challenged legitimately by someone on his own side, as challenging him on those grounds means you’re not on his side at all.

Reporter Benjy Sarlin captured the absurdity when he tweeted, “It’s hard to sum up the 2024 situation more succinctly than this: Trump is already calling DeSantis a groomer based 100% on innuendo with 0 penalty; and DeSantis cannot respond by citing an actual jury finding of sexual abuse.” It’s ludicrous. But it’s also completely rational for DeSantis and the rest of the field under the circumstances to overlook the Carroll trial, since to mention it would be to take sides with the left against Trump. And that would disqualify them, not him.

Nick Cattogio, Mostly Peaceful Sexual Abuse.

It is humiliating to live in a nation-state where Donald Trump could win the Presidential election not just once, but twice. But here is where my wife, friends, family and Church are, so I’ll stay and we’ll all go down together.

I’m quite confident that we’ll go down, but what do I know? I’m not a self-appointed “Apostle” or “Prophet” with power to declare that Donald Trump, right now, is our dulytruly-elected President.

Law or Donald Trump? Pick one.

[W]e watched as even Trump-nominated judges ruled time and again against Trump’s election challenges, yet a majority of Republicans still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to carry the 2020 election. When the choice is between the law and the evidence or Donald Trump, Republicans have consistently picked Trump.

But is sexual abuse different? Can an actual jury verdict — after a trial featuring all the due process that American law requires — finally break the bond with Trump?

Here is the darkest possible outcome to the case, one that I fear is more likely than not. The Republican public will either shrug at the result or will simply choose to disbelieve the jury, assuming without evidence that it was biased against Trump. Indeed, when asked about the verdict, Senator Marco Rubio told a Bulwark reporter, “That jury’s a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham said he questioned “the whole process” and told Punchbowl News, “I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby.”

But would a jury so hopelessly biased against Trump jury reject Carroll’s rape claim? Or is that an indication that the jury actually weighed the evidence supporting each charge?

David French

More Trump derangement

It’s deja vu all over again

Back when Trump first burst on the scene in the summer and fall of 2015, conservative pundits assured us the Republican electorate would reject him and opt for someone/anyone else. That turned out to be wrong—yet here we are nearly eight years later and often the very same people now assure us the Republican electorate would be rejecting Trump and embracing DeSantis if only the media weren’t playing dirty.

I don’t buy it.

Hey, I get it: Being wrong’s a bitch. Yet error can still be worthwhile if it serves as an opportunity to learn and course-correct. Right-leaning writers recognized this when they made the point against Democrats who spent the better part of the Trump administration blaming Vladimir Putin, James Comey, the New York Times, CNN—really anyone but themselves—for Clinton’s loss. But now these same conservatives refuse to subject themselves to the same degree of scrutiny and soul-searching.

Which means they are depriving themselves of the chance to adjust their thinking in the light of a bracing and crucially important truth about the Republican Party: That when given the choice between a know-nothing narcissist and moral cretin who embodies their resentments and channels their anger and hatred but accomplishes little and a candidate who’s spent years proving himself a vastly more competent, woke-slaying enemy of liberalism, the voters still prefer the first guy.

Decrying the fact doesn’t make it any less true.

Damon Linker

Bad Omen

I never did much criminal law, but this strikes me as a bad omen if your name is Donald Trump:

A Friday court filing revealed that at least eight of the 16 false Georgia electors who planned to declare former President Donald Trump the winner of their state’s 2020 presidential contest have accepted immunity deals in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation of attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The brief filed by the electors’ defense attorney shows the electors will be immune from prosecution if they testify truthfully in the probe.

The Morning Dispatch for May 8

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Thursday, 1/5/23

Culture

Words to live by

The larger point is that a rich and satisfying life involves checking a lot of boxes, not checking the same box over and over again until the combination of the ink and the pressure punches through the paper of your checklist. Moreover, some of these boxes require subordinating yourself to something greater than yourself. Virtually all meaningful institutions demand some sacrifice of yourself and your immediate wants to the greater good of the institution. The family is the first and most obvious example of this. You can’t be a good father or husband, mother or wife, if you expect your family to always put your needs first.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Why not wait and see if the odds are with you?

The best estimate, from studies starting in the 1970s, is that around 80% of gender-dysphoric children who are allowed to express themselves as they wish, but who do not socially transition—change their clothes, pronouns and the like to present as members of the opposite sex—will, as they grow up, become reconciled to their biological sex. Yet puberty blockers seem to prevent that reconciliation. In European clinics that report numbers, it happens with just 2-4% of children given the drugs. American clinics rarely publish figures, but anecdotally the picture is similar.

The Economist, Gender Medicine — Little Is Known About the Effects of Puberty Blockers. So far as I know, this is still true almost two years later, but the U.S. was charting its own ideologically-mad pursuit of a standard of care that said “block puberty at a minimum, no questions asked,” unlike any of our peer nations.

Self-own extraordinnaire.

I had no idea who Andrew Tate was, that he had a stable of cars, that he trolls Greta Thunberg, and that he now holds the world record for a self-own. But then someone shared this: Andrew Tate’s Arrested for Human Trafficking After Trolling Greta Thunberg.

What Purdue did in the Daniels Decade

We stood for excellence at scale. We did not accept that there’s a tradeoff when bringing education to more people – the original assignment of land grant universities like ours, to open the doors, widen the aperture to higher education. Many people, with some cause, said, Well, the bigger you grow, the lower the quality of the students you’ll have. Many of them will not succeed. We’ve challenged that. And in fact, we have grown 30%. The quality of our students, their performance, the graduation rates, everything has gone up, not down. As my successor will be happy to tell you, we’ve grown to one of the biggest engineering colleges anywhere. And at No. 4 in the national rankings, we are bigger than the top three put together. So you don’t have to trade that off, and I think we’re demonstrating that.

We said that in a world where outcomes are more and more determined by technology and science and the advance of those disciplines that we had an unusual opportunity, and very much a duty, to deliver to the nation more graduates skilled in those areas and more research that contributed the advanced knowledge in those areas. Ten years ago, 41% of the students at this university were in a STEM discipline – a high percentage. Today, it’s 68%, of a student body that is 30% bigger. We are producing for this nation, the kind of talents on which our future success so heavily depends.

Now former Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, via Based in Lafayette, a Substack that’s indispensible for local news as the local Gannett newspaper struggles.

I have my reservations about big research universities, but Purdue, and land-grant University, is a pretty good neighbor.

An Englishman on American Football

I see American Football as the sport that’s the obvious creation of a society based around hyperconsumption. It’s only about a dozen minutes of actual stuttering play stuffed into this capitalist packaging of hype and image, coming with hundreds of adverts for products you weren’t interested in and drowning in a wealth of the packing chips of instant replays and shots of players and officials loitering. I just can’t see the appeal.

Alastair Roberts He said that almost seven years ago. It wasn’t a prophecy of injuries or fatalities, but the appeal of the American spectacle should, but probably won’t, diminish after the Damar Hamlin cardiac arrest on field, triggered by the kind of hits fans pay to see. I’m skeptical that technology can make safe a game based on large people crashing into each other at high speed.

American Football eclipsed by World Football/Soccer is one of my hopes for progress.

David French to wed the grey lady

All things considered, I’m content.

David French will become a regular columnist for the New York Times on January 30 and will cease being a regular columnist for The Dispatch, which he helped to found. But (whew!) he’ll continue doing the Advisory Opinions podcast with Sara Isgur. That’s what mattered most to me.

And I subscribe to NYT, so I’ll read his relocated columns, too.

Maybe The Dispatch should try to wrest Michael Brendan Dougherty or Daniel McCarthy away from National Review now.

The Alzheimer’s Streetlight Effect

There’s an old joke about a drunk who lost his keys. It even has given a name to a cognitive error: The Streetlight effect.

I’m reminded again that it’s not always funny, as when scientists pursue theories that have been pretty well disproven, such as amaloid plaques as the cause of Alzheimer’s, simply because that’s where the grant money is.

On the other hand, that does tend to prove that scientists and humans, not gods, and as prone to venality as any preacher who tells his people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

British Mysteries

The Missus and I have been enjoying British mysteries on the BritBox streaming service, but we’ve reached the point where we agree that the writers riffing on G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, likely British secularists if not neo-pagans, have no idea what makes the protagonist Father Brown (beyond routinely telling the murderer to repent and confess to the police). The stock characters are no longer enough to sustain our interest.

They also have become less imaginative, more graphic (e.g., profuse blood flying in a knockout punch), and more sexual, the sort of pattern that turned us off other mysteries with attractive protagonists (like the Midsomer Murders).

Then, of course, there’s The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs, too, but that’s been fairly obvious for a long time.

Stage Manager

My latest Mac OS update brought with it an annoying intruder named "Stage Manager," who keeps getting in the way of my own stage management.

I learned how to shut him off today, and now I find that I occasionally want him back on. In other words, he’s not all bad.

This is probably just me being a grumpy old man.

Politics (but smarter and less bitter than in the past)

GOP New Years Resolution: Live Not By Lies

I doubt that serial liar and fabulist George Santo deserves as much attention as he’s gotten, but at least it’s all been negative. He seems to be his only apologist.

Yet nobody with power to do anything is proposing to do it. Here’s an idea for them:

Kicking George Santos out of Congress is a job for the people of Long Island, one that they can do for themselves if they should happen to discover some particle of communal self-respect. But there are things that Republicans in Congress could and should do to set an example here: They could and should refuse to give him committee assignments; they could and should vote to censure him; they could and should expel him from the Republican Party. …

If the Republican Party would like to make a desperately needed New Year’s resolution, it should be this: that the GOP will cease being an organization dedicated to lies, based on lies, trafficking in lies, cultivating lies, and strategically reliant on lies. The Republicans should embark on a very modest course of self-improvement that begins with telling the truth. Of course, such a specimen as George Santos would have no place in such a party.

Neither would Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Mike Pence ….

Rachael Larimore

Is Trump now a moderate?

For the first time as a candidate, Trump might not be “the craziest son of a b-tch in the race.” That phrase comes from a memorable interview Rep. Thomas Massie gave in 2017 explaining why so many Ron Paul voters in the 2012 primaries ended up becoming Donald Trump supporters in 2016. An authoritarian candidate should struggle to attract libertarians, but Trump didn’t. Massie knew why.

“I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa,” Massie said. “From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for Rand Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump.”

“All this time,” Massie explained, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a b-tch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Nick Cattogio

What Everybody Knows

[E]ven if American institutions and rules make the U.S. system more unstable (under certain conditions) than those in other democracies, the events of January 6 depended on the introduction of an additional variable as a catalyst—and that is Donald Trump’s narcissism and malevolence. Trump simply couldn’t face his own loss—or rather, he couldn’t face admitting his own loss in public—and avoiding that humiliation was more important to him even than the fate of American self-government. If getting himself declared the winner required overturning the rule of law and liberal democracy in the United States, that was fine with him.

…

[A] number of prominent GOP candidates were extreme, badly informed, personally unappealing, and wildly inarticulate, and so performed poorly in the midterm’s general election contests. But how did these bum candidates end up competing in general elections in the first place? The answer, obviously, is that Republican voters chose them (often at Trump’s urging).

And that means it isn’t just Trump who’s responsible for January 6. It’s also all the voters who ended up doubting the trustworthiness of America’s electoral institutions across the board while simultaneously placing the entirety of their faith in the hands of a verified con artist out to protect his delicate ego from the painful truth of his failure to win an election.

It’s this consideration, among others, that keeps me from joining The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last in reversing position on the question of whether Trump should be prosecuted. Where Last has come around to the view that prosecution may well be the least-bad option, I continue to believe it would be less bad to allow Trump to continue fading in stature than to risk reviving his reputation among the mob of dittoheads who once revered him by turning him into an outlaw/folk-hero locked in a fight to the figurative death with the “Democrat Justice Department.”

Damon Linker, What Everybody Knows

Blaming the victim without regret

Even on issues where I am nominally on his side, I think he deserves all of the trouble he has invited upon himself …

I do not think Congress should make his tax returns public because I think punitively releasing tax returns is a bad practice, even when done against people I think have it coming.

…

Donald Trump lied over and over again about his tax returns. He said he’d release them, then didn’t, claiming he couldn’t because he was being audited. He probably lied about the audit; he certainly lied that being audited prevented him from releasing them. He broke all sorts of rules—admittedly informal rules, but rules nonetheless—and as we’ve seen over and over again, when one “side” breaks the rules, it gives the other “side” psychological permission to break other rules in response. Trump invited the predicament he’s in. He wants the rules to benefit him, never to bind him.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Congress and Trump’s Tax Returns

The actual point of the release is to embarrass Mr. Trump for refusing to release his returns. We criticized him for this, but it isn’t a legal requirement. Democrats needed a legislative purpose to pry private records from the IRS, and the best excuse they could manage was a desire to strengthen the agency’s presidential-audit policy. The weakness of that rationale was laid bare at the Dec. 20 meeting when Ways and Means approved the release.

Karen McAfee, Democrats’ top oversight staffer, couldn’t explain how releasing the returns would affect legislation. Pressed by GOP Rep. Kevin Brady, she sputtered that Democrats want a bill “to make sure that the audits start on time.” No word on how speeding up audits requires broadcasting Mr. Trump’s finances to the world.

The Trump Tax Return Precedent

Here’s another instance where someone did something unjust to Trump, but at the same time it’s true that he brought it on himself.

I doubt we’re heard the last of this. Trumpist Republicans will want payback, and they’ll not have trouble finding allies.

Just Desserts

McCarthy is getting exactly what he deserves. After January 6, he failed to lead. Instead, he swallowed what was left of his pride and traveled down to Mar-a-Lago to make amends with Donald Trump.

Yet he’s not being punished for that grotesque capitulation. Instead he’s facing yet another act of “burn it down” disruption from many of the same figures—including Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert—who’ve built their entire brands around trolling, rage, and rebellion.

It’s possible that GOP obstruction will yield a better speaker. One can hope. But a hope is not a plan, and it seems that the “plan” is to simply block McCarthy and see what happens.

While I don’t want to intrude too much on Nick’s populism beat, one of the tragedies of our time is that populists can often diagnose real maladies (elites have failed in many respects, and America faces real problems), yet they often decide to “solve” the problem with something  worse ….

David French

To hell with that

Wren: To hell with what?

Meijer: With the idea of running at this moment [against other Trumpist candidates]. What is required from a purity test standpoint — folks know they need his endorsement, and then what they end up doing to get that endorsement ends up being disqualifying.

Wren: This dynamic played out with your Republican primary opponent, John Gibbs, the far-right conspiracy theorist who criticized women’s right to vote and propagated the idea that Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta participated in satanic rituals. Yet you went to a unity rally with him. That surprised me.

Meijer: I was surprised at the media reaction to that. In my mind, not going to something like that is a sore loser move. The least I can do is wish him congratulations and best of luck. It’s funny there were a lot of kind of anti-Trump and Never Trump folks who trashed me for that. I was like, “Oh, do you want me to act the same way [Trump] did? Do you want me to deny that I lost? Do you want me to be a sore loser? Come on.”

Former Congressman Pete Meijer

Senator Sinema’s Independent prattling

… we are united in our … independence.

Kyrsten Sinema, putative Independent, via Lee Drutman, Kyrsten Sinema and the Myth of Political Independence

I fear that her personal declaration of independence will be the electoral kiss of death, as it was with another interesting political figure, Justin Amash.

Closing thought

Life doesn’t come with a trigger warning.

Poet/Activist Pádraig Ó Tuama, Interview with Krista Tippett

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