My cup overflowed

Unnoticed, I had filled my cup to overflowing. Pour yourself a cup and enjoy the (mostly) curation.

Trans turning point?

Keeping score

“Males have stolen over 879 trophies, medals, and titles from women and girls across 423 different competitions in over 28 different sports,” – Reilly Gaines.

The Cass Report

In Great Britain, the Cass Report, a comprehensive four-year study of transgender medicine for pre-adults, has case deep shade on past practices — practices Europe is backing away from frantically but which the US Medical establishment still supports. Andrew Sullivan gives them both barrels:

Big Pharma created lucrative “customers for life” by putting kids on irreversible drugs for a condition that could not be measured or identified by doctors and entirely self-diagnosed by … children.

And what if over 80 percent of the children subject to this experiment were of a marginalized group — gay kids? And the result of these procedures was to cure them of same-sex attraction by converting them to the opposite sex? I simply cannot imagine that any liberal or progressive would hand over gender-nonconforming children, let alone their own children, to the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex to be experimented on in this way.

…

Accountability? Good luck with that. Will any of the Twitter mobs who hounded the skeptics take stock? Will the ACLU’s Chase Strangio feel any regret for trying to censor the first major book raising the alarm? Will groups like GLAAD and HRC confess to their grotesque lies — “The Science Is Settled” — and ugly bullying tactics to suppress reporting on the question? Will they cop to having supported gay conversion therapy in which many gay kids were “fixed” by being turned physically into the opposite sex?

Will HRC and countless educators temper the curriculum that tells small children that their bodies are irrelevant to whether they are a boy or girl, and that they can change their sex at will? Will these ideologues ever concede the foul homophobia behind questioning the maleness of a girly boy or the femaleness of the tomboy? Will they ever admit that their ideological extremism, and their “queer” conflation of trans and gay experiences, has led to one of the greatest medical abuses of gay kids in history? Of course they won’t. As I write, HRC and GLAAD have not uttered a peep about the report’s findings. They are intellectually and morally bankrupt institutions, desperate for money, and using the scarred bodies of gender-dysphoric children to fundraise.

In a sane world, the doctors who pushed these lucrative treatments and the leaders of the transqueer groups responsible for the wreckage of so many young gay and lesbian lives should resign in shame. So should the MSM journalists who were stenographers for these fanatics, acting to suppress the truth rather than expose it. So should the gay doctors who supported this insanity. This was — and remains — a horrifying case of gays betraying our own — and the most vulnerable and helpless among us.

History will be brutal to those responsible. But almost certainly not brutal enough.

For me, it has always been sufficient that “woman in a man’s body” or vice-verse isn’t a real thing. The sexual binary is real. We are “assigned” names at birth, not sex, which is discovered then (if not previously). We do nobody any favors by saying “Sure, sweetie; you are whatever sex you say you are.”

Gender dysphoria is a real thing, too — a form of mental illness that should be treated with all due skill and compassion. I cannot imagine non-surgical approaches having been exhausted before a minor becomes an adult.

Transgender madness

Nothing that so captures the essence of the Cass Report as this:

Instead of taking narrow claims of dysphoria at face value, Cass adopts a holistic approach, arguing that such statements must be considered “within the context of poor mental health and emotional distress among the broader adolescent population.”

Nina Power, The Trans Reckoning is Here. Considering the context doesn’t mean ignoring, but exploring all possibilities before doing something radical.

No longer, in the sentient world, will doctors be valorized for taking narrow claim of dysphoria at face value — what has come to be called “affirming,” and beginning the process that leads to sexual mutilation in the name of sex-change.

Some U.S. legislatures had already arrived at the unfashionable conclusion that “affirming” kids with gender dysphoria through “social transitioning,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and such was bad medicine, and some, including my own, went so far as to ban the medical transitioning as to legal minors. I have my doubts about legislatures practicing medicine, but the provocation was great, and I have little doubt that legislative bans will protect more kids than they hurt.

So I was feeling pretty good about the turning of the tide on trans when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a front-page, above-the-fold story in my local Gannett rag about the woes of Hoosier kids with gender dysphoria who no longer can get their desired trendy treatments in-State. The story included all the groin pieties about puberty blockers being safe and reversible — some of the very claims debunked by the Cass Report. Had they intended that story as a provocation, it could not have been better timed.

The Cass Report is fairly fresh off the press, and is the work of but one researcher, although she was very well-credentialed and took four years on the project. It probably will be critiqued — carefully, one hopes, although there may instead be an effort to mob-cancel it for want of rational criticisms.

Meanwhile, it is as if the Report gave permission for common sense to speak what it has been intimidated from saying for too long.

In my home, the local Gannett rag will be cancelled.

This is a huge step emotionally. I grew up on newspapers. My older brother had a huge paper route. Reading the daily newspaper was one of the things responsible adults did. But smaller-market newspapers have been killed by the internet. Our local rag has descended into a collection of celebrity gossip, feature stories, and a smattering of news stories from other Gannett rags in the state. It doesn’t even include enough advertising and coupons to justify hanging on any longer. That trans propaganda was just the last straw.

I’ll try to replace it with a combination of:

A retired newsman’s substack. He’s been scooping the newspaper frequently already — and his stuff is timelier, not delayed by 48 hours.
Local television websites.
Two local funeral home websites for obituaries.

We’re in a strange new world.

Culture

Billy Joel

I vividly remember the first time I heard Billy Joel on the radio. Mainstream pop/rock radio was not part of my childhood listening diet, so I was already in my early teens. I was having lunch in a university roadhouse with my father and a visiting scholar, a young neo-classical composer. We took turns poking fun at the songs on the roadhouse channel, until “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” struck up. Then the composer paused to listen, raised a finger and said, dead serious, “This is a great song.”

Bethel McGrew

Eclipse

This, too, via Bethel McGrew:

As [Annie Dillard] put it so memorably, the difference between a partial and a total solar eclipse is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.

Virtues

I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics, for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.

The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.

David French, The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic – The New York Times

Preppers

When I attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic “Little House on the Prairie.”

Stephen Marche, author of “The Next Civil War.”

Turning the tables

There was a dramatic jump upward in divorce rates at the beginning of the 1970s. Women whose husbands walked out were faced with the prospect of raising large families on the minimum wage. I remember that time well. Divorce laws were not particularly favorable to women in many places. One reaction was for mothers to teach their daughters never to put themselves in such a vulnerable position. This kicked off the spiral of demands for more pay and more opportunities in education and the workplace. Arguably, the pendulum has now swung too far, and men are disadvantaged by divorce laws. Why work to become a marriageable man if marriage is now such a risky proposition, especially in an era of relaxed sexual norms?

Stacie Beck in a letter to First Things

Putting our money where our hearts are

… (in most US states, the highest-paid public servant is a football or basketball coach at a state university)

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

NPR

“NPR is why I got into journalism. But it’s also partially why I left legacy media. By 2018, Trump voters wouldn’t talk to me, and I didn’t blame them — we often painted them as racists. And if I ever booked a white man, I’d better have a reason why,” – Olivia Reingold.

Via Andrew Sullivan

The Open Internet

I really do think that the internet, in its original open form, is an amazing thing and a genuine contributor to human flourishing — but the occlusion of the open web by the big social media companies has been a disaster for our common life and for the life of the mind. My plan, and my hope, is to keep going here long after I have lost the ability to publish anywhere else. This is my home on the web and also the place where I can most fully be myself as a writer. And that’s worth a lot.

Alan Jacobs

Wordplay

Via Frank Bruni:

In The Financial Times, Anjana Ahuja questioned the potential of a new meat: “With half the U.K. population reporting anxiety about snakes and about one in 50 harboring a phobia, the idea of snakes as the new livestock of choice might not have legs.” (Lois Russell, Somerville, Mass.)
Ezra Dyer paid tribute to an automotive throwback, the Dodge Challenger Black Ghost: “It’s a stupid car, really, peak mouth-breather, screaming of wretched excess. But its analog mechanical brutality activates some primal lobe deep in our brains, the one that catalyzes noise into adrenaline. The final V-8 Challenger rolled off the line on Dec. 22 last year, another dinosaur obliterated by the E.V. asteroid.” (Gerry O’Brien, Goderich, Ontario)
In The London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann took pointed issue with some right-wing warriors: “It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action,’ and that is shock and awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it.” (William Wood, Edmonton, Alberta)

Mercy

The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Mat, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow

Abortion

Donald Albatross Trump

The problem for pro-lifers is that … efforts at persuasion have become markedly less effective over a timeline that overlaps closely with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party

…

[O]ne does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.

…

With that kind of standard-bearer, the accusations of your opponents — that your cause is organized more around repression than protection, more around hypocrisy than high ideals — are going to carry more weight. And some people who might have been your allies, who share your general moral worldview, are going to find reasons to disassociate themselves from your political project.

… [T]he form of conservatism that he embodies is entirely misaligned with the pro-life movement as it wants and needs to be perceived.

That’s the price of the bargain abortion opponents made. The deal worked on its own terms: Roe is gone. But now they’re trapped in a world where their image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by their own.

Ross Douthat

Abortion Politics

Kevin D. Williamson comes out swinging on abortion politics:

The conservative legal view of Roe v. Wade—which is not necessarily an anti-abortion view—is that the Supreme Court exnihilated a federal right to abortion straight out of the penumbras of Justice Harry Blackmun’s posterior based on very little more than pure political will, and that Dobbs rightly reversed this act of judicial superlegislation, returning the matter to the democratic process and, mainly, to state legislatures. A person who generally supports abortion rights could easily hold that position—and, indeed, many do. By no means is it the case, however, that, as Trump stated, vacating Roe was something “that all legal scholars [on] both sides wanted.” (Even on the most serious of moral issues, Trump cannot help but lie, stupidly, blatantly, and to no purpose. He lies out of habit and because he enjoys it.) The argument about Roe was an argument about law, not an argument about abortion.

Now comes the argument about abortion.

Overturning Roe provided only the opportunity to have that argument, and, for the moment, the anti-abortion side is not having a lot of luck advancing its case. Possibly this is because the anti-abortion movement has chosen a leader who so transparently does not give a fig about abortion or any other moral or political question except to the extent that it serves his interests …

…

Consensus-building in this matter is not something undertaken in order to accommodate abortion enthusiasm in the interest of advancing a broader political agenda but rather the opposite: Consensus-building is the only way to build a stable, long-term policy that actually protects the lives of the unborn and reduces—in fact, not in theory—the practice of abortion. Consensus-building is the way toward anti-abortion goals, not a detour from them. As I have written before: The pro-life movement doesn’t win when nobody can get an abortion—it wins when nobody wants one.

Trump’s Toxic Touch (Boldface added)

Election 2024

100% wrong

This is what an interactive Economist article thinks about my Presidential vote in November:

Here’s what the Economist thinks of my likely vote this Fall

Switch me to California and it flips strongly. I’m told the paywall is down, so size up yourself.

FWIW

The Democratic National Committee paid President Joe Biden’s legal bills while he was under investigation by special counsel Robert Hur over whether the president mishandled classified documents, Axios reported Friday. While the Biden campaign has attacked former President Donald Trump for using campaign funds to pay his compounding legal bills, the committee paid $1.5 million—mostly between July 2023 and February 2024—to attorneys and firms representing Biden during Hur’s probe. While Trump has spent funds from his Save America political action committee on legal fees, it is unlikely that his campaign is using money from the Republican National Committee for that purpose.

David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu and Michael Warren

Presidential Debates 2024

Trump has repeatedly challenged Biden to debate him even though he skipped all of the debates in the Republican presidential primary.

David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu and Michael Warren Camp Biden is hinting that he won’t debate. I don’t blame them: Trump doesn’t really debate; he slings insults and one-liners (last item) that demean any “debate” he’s in. Add to that a Democrat candidate who has lost a step or two, and the opening Trump gave him by not deigning to debate his inferiors, and I’m in Camp Biden on debating.

P.S. David Frum says it better than I:

President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”

Hoist with his own petard

New York Judge Juan Merchan—who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial—on Friday rejected one of Trump’s final efforts to delay the proceedings set to begin later today. Trump and his team asked for the trial to be pushed “indefinitely” on the grounds that the media attention surrounding it would make it impossible for Trump to receive a fair trial. Merchan, however, held that Trump intentionally generates much of the media attention. “The situation Defendant finds himself in now is not new to him and at least in part, of his own doing,” the judge wrote.

The Morning Dispatch

Politics generally

Cui bono?

In Dallas, Texas, last Thursday night, four people walked onto a stage: a libertarian, a recent dropout from the Democratic race for president, an economic populist, and Ann Coulter, who needs no introduction.

They were all asked a single question, which is also the No. 1 issue that will affect the 2024 election: Should the United States close its borders?

It’s the kind of topic that’s become impossible to talk about out loud and in public. One side accuses the other of xenophobia and racism; the other of lawlessness and cheating the electoral system.

But at The Free Press, we believe that the issues that matter most to Americans are worth talking about in public, without fear. That’s why we partnered with FIRE to launch our new series, the America Debates, moderated by our founder, Bari Weiss.

So on Thursday at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas, we welcomed a crowd of 700 from states all over the nation including Utah, Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. We even met a few readers who flew in from London.

There were best friends from high school, women in cowboy boots, and married couples on either side of the issue—including Dr. Nina Niu Sanford, who immigrated to the U.S. from China at age three, and her husband, a native Texan born to a Mexican immigrant. (She voted in favor of America shutting its borders; he voted against.)

“If you want to hear an exchange of ideas it’s basically relegated to AM radio,” a pregnant woman from Rhode Island who flew 1,700 miles to the event told me. “But you never get people like this, just sitting on a stage together, hashing out ideas.”

Jake Billings, a 34-year-old from Utah, said he arrived believing in an open border. But when he heard Ahmari list the ways Americans without college degrees get the short end of the stick because of illegal migration, he felt swayed in a different direction.

“He just laid out how it hurts the working class, which is where I come from,” said Billings, who shared that his mother was one of 13 kids. “What can I say? I’m a facts person.”

The Free Press

This summary was preceded by “The full video of the event will be available soon to paid subscribers of The Free Press. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today.” The Free Press has become Substack’s subscription champion for good reason.

If you’re not a Free Press subscriber, you’re missing some awfully good stuff. Same for the Dispatch. If I had budget woes, those would be among the last to go.

Pro-Ukraine without playing the Hitler card

Dan Coats, Why Aid for Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia Matters pushes just about all the buttons I needed pushed to unenthusiastically support continued aid.

I try to avoid a Manichean outlook on the world, but even without White Knight delusions, there’s a case to made, and Coats makes it well without a facile Putin = Hitler narrative.

Why the new Christian right keeps losing

For the most part, the new Christian right is almost entirely lacking in the discipline, self-control, and judgment required to secure real political victories in a democratic system. Small wonder many of them want a totalitarian dictator, then. Maybe that’s the only way they’ll ever actually accomplish anything legislatively.

Jake Meador, who has some Nebraska receipts to prove his point, in Vibe Emission Is Not a Political Strategy

“The props of official Christianity”

“I don’t think the fixes that most conservatives propose would fix anything,” he said. “I don’t think bringing back in the props of official Christianity is going to get at the darkness at the center of all this.” To him the Christian worldview had become just too remote in America, and worse, millions of Americans denied the very notion of the objective truth. Like many other conservative evangelicals at the end of the century, Mohler spoke of “postmodernism” rather than “secular humanism” as the condition of godless modern America.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. I occasionally agree with Albert Mohler, and this is one of those occasions.

Maxine Waters changes her tune

In the young and fun days of 2018, Maxine Waters encouraged protesters to confront politicians in restaurants. In those Olden Times, she said: “If you see anybody from that cabinet [Trump’s] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” (H/t Dan O’Donnell for tracking this video down.)

Fast-forward a few years and here is Maxine Waters, after facing mild protest from a single person at a single restaurant: “As a member of Congress, where people—you know—who evidently had a racist attitude, and recently even one confronted me in a restaurant—and they don’t say racist things but what they say is they don’t like something I said. They don’t like a position that I took. But you know that—you know—if you were not black, you would not be approached that way.” Exactly. A dissatisfied constituent has never approached a white politician.

…

Meanwhile, everyone at Harvard is upset that conservative activist and writer Chris Rufo keeps finding egregious plagiarism in this or that beloved professor’s work. And The Harvard Crimson this week has a proposal: “We can’t let outsiders control the plagiarism narrative. Harvard and other universities must stay ahead of the game, surfacing instances of plagiarism and addressing them before malicious actors can hurt the University’s credibility.” I do believe Chris Rufo will accept those terms.

Nellie Bowles

The post-religious right

In February 2016, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” His words captured a widely shared assumption that the rise of Donald Trump signaled not only the death of the religious right, but the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance.

It is clear now that this assumption was wrong …

Matthew Schmitz, JD Vance, Religious Populist

No, I don’t think that’s clear at all. As Schmitz notes, there is a surprising move of many Hispanics and Blacks toward the GOP, and that puts a caveat on the “white racial grievance” part of Douthat’s assumption. But I don’t think it clearly disproves it.

This is but a quibble about Schmitz’s article, which I was prepared to dislike (perhaps even hate), but which I found interesting and helpful in several ways.

No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It

The price tag of the Trump presidency exceeds its value exponentially. The tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, executive orders, and cultural counter-offensives (“he fights”) are trinkets compared to the way he has undermined the values and norms required to sustain the rule of law and the constitutional order.

No, Trump’s Presidency Wasn’t Worth It

Politics makes me want to p***!

I just heard the story of a candidate who was furious with his estranged wife for not posing for a family photo with the kids. I can’t say more for fear of too precisely identifying the situation, in which wife and children are quite innocent and don’t need the hassle.

Our six primary candidates for governor aren’t much better, although their badness differs from his.

Politics is so phony it makes me want to puke. Well, actually, it makes me want to post.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Thursday, 4/11/24

Permanence

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”

Feckless Diktator

Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.

The Morning Dispatch

What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!

NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels

“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”

Kyle Neddenriep

I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”

Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.

Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?

I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-life chorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.

Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.

So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.

For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)

Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is in the Air (2021)

Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.

Gaining Perspective

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Can we afford the rich?

While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:

“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”

Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:

“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”

Dense Discovery, quoting Why the world cannot afford the rich

Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!

Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.

On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.

…

Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.

Trump Blows Up Anti-Terror Surveillance – WSJ

Modernists losing copyright protection

For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Back home in Indiana

The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:

BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.

Indiana Court Rejects Claim That Driver’s Licenses Must Include Third Gender Option

I appreciate living in a state that isn’t “way out there” to either extreme.

Wordplay

1

… umbraphilia — the love of eclipses …

Where You Can See the Next Total Solar Eclipse, in 2026 – The New York Times

2

You cannot make a competitive selection process a tool for equality, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.

Freddie deBoer

3

Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

4

Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

5

fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick], Una Sancta: Fundamentalism, Ecumenism and the One True Church

6

… the Netherlands, a country so flat it feels it’s been ironed into submission.

Chris Arnade

7

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

March 5, 2024

Art

Popular “unpopular art”

[A]art is in a peculiar and dangerous position these days. This week, over 17,000 artists and activists signed an open letter demanding that Israeli artists be excluded from the Venice Biennale festival in Italy, simply because they are Israelis. And even while that attempt at censorship is launched, other artists proclaim how brave they are for art on certain pet causes, violating taboos that no one has enforced for decades and everyone they know already mocks. There is no real cost to such stands.

Joseph Bottum

Popular art

Meet Frankey, the Street Artist Delighting Amsterdam – The New York Times (shared link, no paywall). I was afraid this story would be about another Banksy type graffiti artist (I viscerally hate graffiti). Not at all. It’s sheer whimsical delight.

IVF

The ephemeral threat to IVF

In June 2022, the court ended federal access to abortion, kicking abortion policy back to the states.

Since then, nine states—Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have outlawed abortion outright, not even allowing the procedure when women become pregnant through rape or incest. (Alabama’s IVF ruling is the most extreme pro-life ruling yet.) …

How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’ | The Free Press

Alabama Supreme Court’s decision might ramify unpopularly, bearing in mind the conservative adage that there are popular “unpopular opinions” (i.e., “popular among our leftcoastal readers, less so in flyover country”) and unpopular “unpopular opinions (i.e., “popular among the fundamentalist deplorables in flyover country but vilified by leftcoastal types).

But I digress. The Alabama decision was a ruling in favor of IVF-availing parents whose frozen embryos were negligently destroyed by another patient for lack of safeguards at the IVF clinic. There were no sinister designs on IVF in the opinion at all.* So constantly throwing the decision into the abortion mix strikes me as shit-stirring clickbait.

And “they” must stir the shit, and bait the clicks, vigorously and now, because IVF is in fact popular and the Alabama legislature is hastening to protect it from unintended consequences of the Court’s decision. (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

* Alabama’s Supreme Court had earlier ruled that wrongful death action was allowed to parents for loss of descendants en ventre sa mere; the recent case clarified that intrauterine or extrauterine descendants were within contemplation of the parental wrongful death law.

The case against IVF

While we’re on the subject, I think it’s important for people in secure positions occasionally to voice unpopular unpopular opinions — opinions that others may be too cancelable to voice.

For the record, I have serious moral qualms about IVF, based on a combination of (a) knowing that in the U.S., IVF practice knowingly creates large numbers of embryos that will eventually be destroyed and (b) some Roman Catholic influence that tells me babies should be made in marital beds, not laboratories.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know briefly sketches the Roman Catholic case against IVF (thought his immediate target is cloning).

So you would say that aspirin, surgery to remove a tumor, and cloning “respect” nature, too.
Not cloning.
Why not? Doesn’t it assist the natural function of having babies?
Once more: our nature is our design. We are designed to have babies, but we are not designed to have them in that way. To put it another way, our design includes not only certain ends but certain means. There is a difference between repairing the reproductive system and bypassing it.
Well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anyway.
I think it is a very big deal. When you try to turn yourself into a different kind of being, you are not only doing wrong but asking for trouble. He who ignores the witness of his design will have to face the witness of natural consequences.

If you think this argument has (not “should have”) any appreciable political valence in the USA, you need to get a grip. I’m just saying it should have some valence.

I don’t know where I ultimately would come out on IVF it were there an opportunity to discuss it, not just Roman Catholic voices crying in the wilderness versus reflexive dismissal of those voices.

Law

Witless Ape returns to ballot

[I]t was a perfectly defensible position to hold that Trump should be disqualified. What was indefensible was the air of swaggering certainty that permeated so many of those takes. … self-evident. Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.

Damon Linker

David French was in the “Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.” camp, and he’s not going down without a final howl of protest:

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

David French

I guess the Supreme Court considers whether it’s best to shade the law when following it fearlessly could unleash chaos. It’s days like yesterday that make that obvious, indisputable.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson for the “Witless Ape” image; he minted it, and the linked item is a classic.)

The exceedingly long arm of Russian law

The media reported last week that Russian authorities had arrested Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen, and charged her with treason for donating a nominal sum to an organization that aids Ukraine … The charges against Ms. Karelina are an assault on what it means to be American. The Russian state contends that for a U.S. citizen to make a donation to a U.S. charity and to attend a peaceful protest on U.S. soil is a punishable offense on arrival in Russia.

Dora Chomiak in the Wall Street Journal

Trump’s immunity claims

People who want Donald Trump tried, convicted and jailed before November, for acts while he was in office, have my sympathy, but as we head ever deeper into a tit-for-tat polarized political world, I must substantially agree with Lee Kovarsky instead: Trump Should Lose. But the Supreme Court Should Still Clarify Immunity. – The New York Times.

Trump’s immunity claims are far too broad, but ex-Presidents need at least narrow immunity. Running for high office is already so fraught that I question the sanity of anyone who runs. Add to the existing ugliness the prospect of criminal prosecution, with no possible immunity if the other party wins next time, and we’ll have nobody but saints and sociopaths willing to risk it.

Qualified Immunity

In Indiana, we have a political novice candidate for governor whose first major media buy was an ad with him sitting in a rustic church, slightly misquoting the Bible and earnestly telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It kind of turned my stomach.

The second major media buy was an ad with a well-spoken Rwandan refugee, who became his foster daughter, telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It was much more believable.

His third major media buy simplistically says that qualified immunity (over which governors have little or no control) protects police and so protects us and brillig, and slithey toves, gyring and gimbling in the wabe, and “as governor, your safety will always come first” (sic).

Eric Doden has now lost me for sure. Qualified Immunity, a court-created line-item veto, effectively turns “every person” in 42 USC §1983 into “precious few people.”

Miscellany

[Expletive deleted] AI

It is not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Hitler. Both have had a significant impact on society, but in different ways.

Google’s Gemini AI via Nellie Bowles

Pride before the Fall

No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Such words smacked of hubris, the excessive pride that goes before a fall. And so they would turn out to be, expressing a mistaken vision that would lead to cruel and tragic consequences for the South. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and its prices would never fall, the South would become fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale but that achieved such productivity at an incalculable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with changing moral sensibilities in the world, and with fundamental American ideals.

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

Psychological Man

My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question, given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man’s world, to which he did not belong.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Where paranoia is the mark of sophistication

In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

David French, Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

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

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

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

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

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

The Bunkinator

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

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

Stop Reading the News

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

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

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

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

The present madness

Gate-crashers

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

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

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

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

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

Boo-boo about BOBOs

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

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

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

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

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

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

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

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

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

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

Effective LARPing the dark side

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

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

David French

Radioactive

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

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

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

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

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

The Druids strike!

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

Hiatus

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

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

David French

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