Category: alt-right

Saturday, 8/19/23

I probably should mention that I have resumed Journaling in DayOne. I’m a bit more candid and introspective in my Journal than here, but it also now includes some whimsy that might over the last few years have wound up in this blog — or that might end up both places.

Bottom line, this blog may change in content and frequency. Since I blog for fun, for free, and maybe for an eensy-weensy bit of influence, I feel no guilt over that, but more discerning readers might notice a shift and friends who read this might wonder if something’s wrong.

Culture

Watch what I do, not what I say

James Hill: “Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in Paris to have lunch at his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. During the 15-minute stroll home, as he kept telling her that he was no longer interested in photography, only drawing, he took three rolls of film on his Leica.”

Why ROGD is the worst fad ever

Of the gender transitioning of minors:

Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from this. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced.

A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.

Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’ talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.” 

There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels, that it is because they’ve transed their child. So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them. But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natal males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.

They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on. And I’m the one that has to be bullied to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I’m sorry to say, because they’ve everything to lose, and it is a fight to the death as far as they are concerned.

Helen Joyce, quote by Jonathon Van Maren, Transgender Movement’s Last Defenders: Parents Who ‘Transitioned’ Their Children. I suppose your mileage may vary, but I found that a wonderfully succinct summary without being uncharitable to parents who, with no malicious intent, truly have helped sell their kids a bill of goods with no return address.

More from Van Maren:

Having a ‘trans kid’ these days is like getting your child into an Ivy League school a couple of decades ago—it’s a status thing. Often parents—mothers in particular—rush to post about their child’s transness on social media, choosing to out them without their permission and often lock them into an identity before they’re old enough to comprehend what’s going on. Children ‘transitioned’ at a young age have the deck stacked against them if they want to ‘de-transition’—not to mention tremendous public, peer, and parental pressure.

Magyar is unique because Hungarians are unique

Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family, “Just,” one of my new friends told me, “as English belongs to the Indo-European.” He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.
“How close?”
“Oh, very!”
“What, like Italian and Spanish?”
“Well no, not quite as close as that …”
“How close then?”
Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “About like English and Persian.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water (bold added)

From Nellie Bowles’ TGIF

  • The social network formerly known as Twitter added a five-second lag to links from sites owner Elon Musk doesn’t like (such as The New York Times and Substack). Once journalists noticed this and asked about it, suddenly the lag disappeared. In other notes on an erratic boss, Musk apparently reached out through a mutual friend to meet with popular business podcaster Scott Galloway, who declined the invitation. Suddenly Galloway was locked out of his Twitter account and has remained so for more than two weeks.
  • Chicago community group called Native Sons that is working to stave off gun violence recently put out a plea to gangs: please commit your shootings at night between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. when there are fewer innocent bystanders to accidentally kill. “We have to start somewhere,” group co-founder Tatiana Atkins told CWBChicago. I guess that’s true. But if you’re gonna do one ask. . . . Also: I don’t know if people who shoot other people will sign up to do that in time slots.
  • Meanwhile, in D.C.’s Ward 8, the only grocery store might close. It’s hemorrhaging money each month because of theft.
  • After negotiations, UPS drivers have a new contract. And they’re going to be making an average of $170,000 a year. We love to see it.

And of the viral song Rich Men North of Richmond:

Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song. You’re gonna be okay. I feel like between this and “Try That in a Small Town,” we’re in a liberal music moral panic not seen since—well, since Mom took away my Eminem CD.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

I’d add to that last one a note to the “conservatives” who are valorizing Rich Men North of Richmond (lookin’ at you, Dreher): Guys, it’s a country bluegrass song, and the singer, who has better sense than you, doesn’t want to be your Messiah. Leave him the heck alone.

Dimwit foes of the Categorical Imperative

If the new right prevails and either defeats or transforms the conservative legal movement, it will not like the world it makes. Degrade the First Amendment, and watch your freedom depend entirely on your political power. You”ll end up banning ideas you dislike in jurisdictions (like Tennessee) where those ideas have little purchase and empowering those ideas in jurisdictions (like California) where they command either majority support or majority acquiescence.

Or, to put it bluntly: If you can ban CRT in one school, you can compel it in another, and heaven help the professor who tries to stand in the way.

David French, The Conservative Legal Movement Is on a Collision Course With the New Right

In a country with expressions like “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a reminder like this should be unnecessary. But it is, because we’re about as bright as geese or ganders and our “Christianity” is mostly a heretical or grossly schismatic mess.

Political and politico-legal

Trump chickens out

I get why Mr. Trump isn’t eager to climb into this sandbox. Debating is hard, and he is out of practice. He participated in only two debates during the 2020 cycle, the first of which was the stuff of campaign legend — but in a bad way. (Proud boys, stand back and stand by!) At some point during Wednesday’s two-hour event he would need to talk about something other than his grievances. He hates doing that, and has always been kind of lousy at it.

Michelle Cottle

Predicate acts

Let’s say, to expand on David and Sarah’s analogy, the staff of The Dispatch decides to get into the kidnapping business. At an “editorial” meeting I bark out orders: “Okay Drucker, you get the duct tape. Isgur, you find us a good nondescript getaway car. Hayes, just keep eating cheese curds until we find something for you to do.”

Drucker gets the duct tape, Sarah gets a sweet AMC Pacer with a tricked-out engine. Hayes provides encouragement. And then we head out to kidnap George Will and hold him for ransom. (“He’s a national treasure! People will pay for his release!”)

When we’re inevitably caught and charged, I won’t have many defenders. But Isgur and Drucker fans might say, “Oh, so buying a car or duct tape is a crime now!? Come on!”

Buying such items isn’t a crime, but buying them in furtherance of a crime is evidence that you committed the crime …

…

With that bit of legal pedantry out of the way, let’s get to the point. There are a lot of acts in the Georgia indictment that are not illegal in their own right but are part of a broader criminal scheme that is—allegedly—illegal. So, Trump’s tweets and speeches are not crimes in themselves, but they are evidence toward proving the larger alleged “criminal enterprise.”

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise – The Dispatch

Wordplay

Pyrocene

pyrocene

A name suggested for our era after the fires on Maui.

Treppenwitz

Treppenwitz is a German word meaning ‘stairway joke’. It’s a word for the joke or comeback you think of way too late – on the stairway as you’re leaving the building. I often experience the pain of a missed Treppenwitz.

Emily Mabin Sutton via Dense Discovery

The Plumbers Problem

John Siracusa writes about “the plumbers problem,” a phrase he created.

“The Plumber Problem” is a phrase I coined to describe the experience of watching a movie that touches on some subject area that you know way more about than the average person, and then some inaccuracy in what’s depicted distracts you and takes you out of the movie. (This can occur in any work of fiction, of course: movies, TV, books, etc.)

Canned Dragons

Violence

a category that now includes punching someone, stabbing them, and using the name on their birth certificate

James Kirchick, Pinkwashing the Thought Police

Race

What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations.

David Freund, historian of race and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park (via Jesse Singal)

Haplogroups

A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: …, haploûs, “onefold, simple” and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together.

I am too weak in science to say what, if any, is the relationship among haplotypes, haplogroups, and the “inherited characteristic” component of “race” in the prior item. But apparently haplogroups are a necessary qualification to the assertion that race is a complete fiction.

That said, take this as a possible analogy: “race is a complete fiction” is to Newtonian physics as haplogroups are to quantum physics. The practical import is that unless you’re a geneticist or some such, it’s fine to live your life thinking of race as a complete fiction.

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, 7/28/23

Legalia

Oh what a tangled web we weave

A federal judge in D.C. vacated the 2017 desertion conviction and dishonorable discharge of former Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off of a base in Afghanistan in 2009. He was captured by the Taliban and held for five years before being freed in a prisoner exchange in 2014. The judge argued Bergdahl did not receive a fair trial because the [military] judge in the case failed to disclose he was concurrently applying for a job in former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department—Trump had called Bergdahl a traitor and suggested he should be executed. Bergdahl may now face a second trial before a different judge.

(TMD) What you think of Bergdahl shouldn’t blind you to the sleaziness of what the military judge did.

Political persecution

From the department of “Damned-if-you do, Damned-if-you-don’t,” a thought on Donald Trump’s legal difficulties:

  • If they prosecute him, “they’re politically persecuting him.”
  • If they don’t prosecute him, they’ve “got nothing on him.”

Heads Trump wins, tails Trump wins.

Such is my former party. Brain dead is the benign explanation; cynical is the likelier (and culpable) explanation.

Well, they’ve got something on him, so let the “persecution” continue.

Not a rubber stamp, but a punching bag

Just as Hunter Biden was on the verge of signing a very nice plea deal to settle up tax and gun charges, Judge Maryellen Noreika mucked it all up. “I cannot accept the plea agreement today,” said Judge Noreika, who is definitely getting audited this year and who should be very careful about going 0.5 miles above the speed limit from now on.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

What could possibly go wrong?

The IRS announced Monday that it would stop making most unannounced, in-person visits to taxpayers—a practice that has long been one of the agency’s key tools to collect unpaid taxes—citing security concerns and taxpayer confusion as scam artists imitated the tactic. The change is part of a 10-year modernization plan focused on cracking down on tax evasion and improving customer service.

TMD

Culture

SAT levels the field

Shocking new study—the SAT is a progressive tool: There are a lot of good liberals who genuinely believe that the SAT is racist, but that teacher recommendation letters and extracurriculars aren’t. My friends: Please think about a teacher at a small private school versus one at a big public school. Who has more time to get to know a kid? Think about extracurriculars: what happens to the kid who needs to work at a deli and can’t launch a nonprofit in Gambia? The SAT is the least racist thing we have. The SAT is the closest to equity in admissions we can ever hope to achieve. Now we have stats from a new study out of Harvard and Brown showing how the ultra-rich can get a huge boost from everything except. . . the SAT.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Soon to be a hateful myth

Meantime, in the U.S., Democrats in Texas and Louisiana voted this week in favor of age restrictions on hormones and gender surgeries, explicitly breaking with the party. Shawn Thierry, a Democrat in Texas, said: “I have made a decision to place the safety and well-being of all young people over the comfort of political expediency.” Let’s not get ahead out ourselves—in Oregon, doctors can treat gender dysphoric adolescents 15 years or older without parental permission or even notification. But I’m pretty sure we’re seeing a shift here. I agree with Jesse Singal that pediatric transitions will very soon be memory-holed as a thing that Absolutely Never Happened.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Budapest, the putative hell-hole

In the two years I’ve lived in Hungary, I have seen many Americans and Western Europeans come to Budapest for the first time, visibly anxious about what they’ll find, as they only know the city and the country from their media, which routinely denounce the Orban government as ‘authoritarian’ and, yes, ‘far-right.’ It only takes a few days for them to realize that they have been lied to, and that Viktor Orbán is the kind of reasonable, effective conservative that most Americans on the Right hope for when they vote Republican, but rarely get.

As I tell Americans headed over, “Budapest feels like a major midwestern American city, circa 1998.” If Clinton-era Omaha, but with better architecture and food, is your idea of Nazitown, maybe the problem is you.

Rod Dreher in European Conservative.

People who matter

[Marty Peretz] writes honestly about the core fight around publishing a symposium on The Bell Curve:

Leon said: Publish a review of the book but don’t run the piece itself. We don’t run Marxists here; we shouldn’t run Social Darwinists. Andrew said: Our readers read Marxists and Marxist derivatives already. If we don’t run Murray they’ll never read him at all — and Murray is a person who matters.

I was speaking about my own ignorance as well: reading the draft of the book was the first time I’d ever even heard there were racial differences in the distribution of mean IQ. That forbidden knowledge — uncontested, uncontestable — was something we needed and need to know. Because it was and is real. That’s all. Why it was real and how to fix it were open questions. And the ongoing debates over the fraught issue are still necessary, which is why the woke left wants to render them entirely taboo — along with countless of their other stagnant little orthodoxies. Our job as writers, I believed, was to open up debate with epistemic humility, courage and precision; it was not to shut it down in a flurry of virtue-signaling.

Andrew Sullivan

I have always rebelled against taboos based on the idea that bad people will make bad uses of what appears to be truly true.

Living by faith

The irony is that we all—secular or religious people alike—make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

The DEI Racket

Jesse Singal notes the reported abandonment of DEI programs in corporate America, and recounts the sad story of a school principal absurdly called racist and white supremacist during prolonged DEI training, and who eventually took his own life

[M]any contemporary DEI trainings “often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems.” There’s an intense, confrontational element to some of them … DiAngelo’s approach leans very heavily on the idea of calling out white employees, in front of their colleagues, for their alleged racial sins …

…

My argument, then and now, is that these sorts of DEI interventions are, very obviously, psychological interventions. What else do you call something that is designed to change the way people think and act? And if they’re psychological interventions, of course they should be subjected to certain standards; perhaps first and foremost, their advocates should be able to assure institutional decision-makers that whatever else they do or don’t accomplish, they won’t cause harm.

But we don’t have that data, because almost none of these programs are formally, rigorously evaluated. I may sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, and I understand that at a certain point I come across as a nerd, but until you have evidence a program works, you don’t have any evidence a program works. It doesn’t matter how glossy the brochure or how impressive the website is. I understand that CEOs were desperate to do something to respond to societal and employee demand in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. But this is a rather undercooked industry, and until it adopts better standards, it will be hard to shed all that many tears over its contraction.

I couldn’t help but think of Orwell’s Animal Farm when I read A Cruel Summer at Cornell, about a Telluride Association Summer Program that seemed to be, if tacitly, about the eventuality of DEI as currently treated.

Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts.

Terry Eagleton

Trigger warnings run amok

We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing” ….

Andrew Doyle, Our culture war is not a distraction.

Indeed we may laugh.

Economics

Perverse economic incentives

The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Efficiency versus humanity

Efficiency was the coldest metric for evaluating a merger. It reduced Americans into the stylized economic caricature known as the “consumer,” treating cheap goods as our highest and only aspiration. The new guidelines inject a bit of humanity back into the calculus. And they suggest that the ultimate question for government shouldn’t be whether something is efficient, but whether it’s right.

Franklin Foer, Biden Declares War on the Cult of Efficiency

I hope I’m not being sold a bill of goods, but if the new Biden antitrust guidelines are as Foer represents them, I approve — and that puts me at odds with The Thing That Used To Be Conservatism.

Politics

Isolationist fascism

Trump differed sharply from the European fascists of the interwar period.

They were ardent militarists and imperialists. War was the crucible in which the new fascist man was to be forged; territorial expansion was both the means and the end of fascist power and triumph. Trump has shown little ambition to pursue such aims.

…

Unlike previous fascist leaders with their cult of war, Trump still offers appeasement to dictators abroad, but he now promises something much closer to dictatorship at home. For me, what Trump is offering for his second presidency will meet the threshold, and the label I’d choose to describe it would be “isolationist fascism.” Until now, such a concept would have been an oxymoron, a historical phenomenon without precedent. Trump continues to break every mold.

Christopher R. Browning, How Trumpism Differs From Fascism

Poverty and hatred

Government has tools to fight Black poverty. It does not have tools to fight white hatred. Not in any real way. Poverty lives in the world. Hatred lives in the head.

Freddie DeBoer

A position that melts on closer inspection

Well, I think . . . they have nothing to do with being president of the United States. The 10th Amendment is very clear about what the federal government’s role is, and what’s not specifically for the federal government, that limited number of things is designated to the states or to the people. I mean, it’s a one-sentence amendment in the Constitution that I believe is basically overstepped all the time, all the time, all the time.

And I’ve seen it as, again, small business. medium business, governor, I’ve seen the federal overreach. So Dobbs? Support Dobbs—leave it up to the states. I was a candidate for not even 12 hours and the first question on CNN was how do you feel about signing a federal abortion amendment? I said I wouldn’t sign it. . . . We said, it’s up to the states, the states have to decide ….

North Dakota Governor and Presidential Candidate Doug Burgum.

I respect Burgum for saying that. For decades, I said that reversal of Roe v. Wade would return the issue to the states. Abortion has never really been a national issue (even if Roe pretended permissive abortion was enshrined in the constitution).

Granted that a federal abortion amendment would by definition make abortion a national issue, and granted that the Right to Life movement has wanted a Human Life Amendment for decades and decades, I’m unsure that the precedent of shifting the federal/state balance is one I can support.

Once upon a time, I called myself a single-issue pro-life voter. But then the GOP started running idiots who had nothing but a supposed pro-life stance to commend them — and often they betrayed in talking about it that they didn’t really get the issues. That put an end to my true single-issue voting. Now, promising a Human Life Amendment will not get me to vote for someone who otherwise is a toxic jack- or jenny-ass, like a Matt Gaetz or a Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The incredible shrinking candidate

There was a time, not that long ago, when I thought I might be able to get behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his bid for the Presidency.

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered state officials to probe whether AB InBev, Bud Light’s parent company, breached its responsibility to shareholders by hiring a transgender social-media influencer. The partnership with Dylan Mulvaney fuelled a boycott by conservatives; AB InBev has shed about a tenth of its stockmarket value since April. Mr DeSantis has also picked fights with Disney for its “wokery”.

The Economist Daily Briefing.

I am not amused by DeSantis on this. I was amused, though, by this: The Real Mystery of Bud Light: How did it become so popular in the first place?

More trolling by Shrinking Man:

DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC – POLITICO

And then there’s the mortifying mistake of the campaign video that ended with a Nazi symbol.

Nick Cattogio:

In 2022 DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a response to the panic on the right over critical race theory. Of course he did: For all the hype about the governor’s post-liberal “vision” for America, his legislative priorities are highly reactive to whatever the populist hobby horse du jour happens to be. It’s an endless game of fetch with Very Online MAGA activists tossing the ball and Ron DeSantis loyally bounding after it in whatever direction it happens to go.

(Emphasis added)

Government’s Covid response

I seem to be seeing articles every day that assume the absurdity of the government response to Covid.

This is a debate (if there be a debate) that I’m not going to enter or even to watch closely, for a couple of reasons:

  • I gladly isolated to a fairly great extent because I’m an introvert.
  • I painlessly isolated to a fairly great extent because I am (and was then) retired and financially comfortable.
  • I prudently isolated to a fairly great extent because I am obese and over age 70 — a demographic that everyone agrees would have been counseled to isolate even by epidemiological dissenters from Dr. Fauci’s approach.

What I will say was that we collectively were surprisingly uninterested in the fate of those mostly low-paid essential workers who had to show up in meatspace, thereby exposing themselves to (supposedly) mortal danger. Did the powers that be really believe they were all in mortal danger? Let’s not forget them.

For want of a Christian conservative, vote secular populist?

I used to say “If you don’t like The Religious Right, just wait ‘till you see the Irreligious Right.”

So how are you disliking it?

Snark aside, this review makes me want to buy yet another book I may not live long enough to read: Tobias Kremer, The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West. How this cashes out in the US, sadly, is that many religious voters are likely to vote for secular populist candidates again for lack of a more attractive alternative.

But there is a more attractive alternative! You just have to reject the idea that one of the two major parties must get your vote and that “anything else is wasted.”

That’s especially easy to do if your state is deep red or deep blue, as you can relax (knowing your vote won’t sway any race) and vote your conscience (not voting for a “lesser evil”) as a signal to the major parties that America is tired of shit sandwiches on the menu.

Dick Bionidi

Dick Bionidi has died. For a midwesterner of a certain age, he was a pretty big deal.

Anniversary

Tomorrow, Saturday July 29, 9:03 pm, is the 58th anniversary of my motorcycle accident. I was hurt memorably, but not grievously or maimingly (if that’s a word).

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.

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.

Monday collation

Politics

The Irreligious Right

I used to say "If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the nonreligious Right." The nonreligious Right is here, and now dominates the grassroots GOP.

Frankly, it’s not (yet) as bad as we feared for varying reasons (but it’s trending worse, I think).

A fantastically good overview, ‌Republicans Are Now the Party of the Nonreligious Right appeared Thursday in, of all places, the New York Times, written by one Nate Hochman of National Review. It is long and deep, and I’m going to need to read it again to sort out what this means for me personally; Hochman already brilliantly identified why the GOP now gives me the willies (as do the Democrats, but then they always have).

I don’t know if I picked up the moniker in the Hochman article, but it appears to me that what he describes may be closely related to what others have calle "Barstool conservatism":

What could unite free-market libertarians, revanchist Catholics, Southern evangelicals, and working-class Reagan Democrats but their shared hatred of… actual Democrats?

Derek Robertson, How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party.

Drain those brains

In the Washington Post, Josh Rogin argues some congressional Republicans are forgetting one of the key takeaways from the Cold War: that exploiting brain drain from autocratic societies is a “smart and righteous” strategy. “The whole world is competing for the talents of those who are fleeing from Hong Kong and Putin’s Russia,” Rogin writes, noting Republicans have blocked efforts to ease visa restrictions for high-skilled workers from those regions. “Cruz claimed that accepting Hong Kongers was the first step to opening our borders and that the Chinese Communist Party could exploit the program to send spies to the United States. This ignores the fact that China has much easier ways to get spies into our country and that the CCP is trying to stop Hong Kongers from leaving because Beijing knows the brain-drain risk for China is real. … Republicans’ excessive fear of immigration should not waste a strategic opportunity for the United States to strengthen itself and weaken its rivals at the same time. Congress should work to ensure that China’s and Russia’s losses are America’s gains.”

The Morning Dispatch.

Surely Rogin is right, right?

Justin Trudeau

One of the oddities of Canadian politics is that its Liberal Party politicians so often sound like they’re running for office in the U.S. And, right on time this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that he wants to ban the sale of handguns and confiscate so-called assault weapons via a mandatory buyback.

The timing is no coincidence, as Mr. Trudeau is responding to the U.S. debate over guns and mass shootings. Apparently Canadian politics is too boring, or parochial, or something, because he also vowed to defend abortion rights after the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked. He even made a show of kneeling at a Black Lives Matter rally in June 2020.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. I generally avoid Editorial Board offerings on the basis that the King James Bible is the only work of art ever created by a committee, but the title "Justin Trudeau Runs for Congress" was powerful bait.

Answer me this …

This battle has been lost, and I see no hope of reversal. I even suspect, as do others, that reversal would be worse than letting it be. But I don’t think questions like this were ever answered:

Assuming a general policy of recognizing committed dyads, should the benefits that Oscar and Alfred [applicants for a hypothetical marriage license] receive depend on whether their relationship is or can be presumed to be sexual?

Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George, What Is Marriage?, Kindle Location 295.

If the benefits received depend on whether the relationship is presumed sexual, then aren’t we leaving a lot of lifelong friends out of the more Platonic benefits that were thrust front and center in rationalizing same-sex marriage?

Damon Linker

Another bright light moves to Substack from legacy media: Damon Linker leaving The Week. His focus, reflected in the Substack title, is the Right.

I’m a Linker fan, but his first three postings seemed a bit underwhelming.

Legalia

Yes, I’m going to (gag!) say something (retch!) about THAT case

The jury in The Case That Kept Gossipy Television Gossiping has decide that she defamed him $15 millionsworth while he only defamed her $2 millionsworth.

It kind of has the feel of a suicide pact from what I could tell in the glimpses I got on TV.

Apparently, the jury verdict identified the three Heard statements they considered defamatory:

The jury was forced to examine three separate statements from the editorial, starting with the headline: “I spoke up against sexual violence—and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”

The second involved Heard’s description of herself as a public figure representing domestic abuse, and the last statement at issue involved the public’s response: “I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”

(Johnny Depp Wins U.S. Defamation Lawsuit Against Amber Heard)

I could easily imagine an appeals court ruling as a matter of law that the second and third were not defamatory. Note, too, that the first technically doesn’t say that she was herself a victim of sexual violence, only that she spoke up against it.

Stay tuned. I don’t think this is over yet, though appeals won’t be blanket-covered like the trial was.

An open letter to SCOTUS Clerks

Very smart blogger David Lat has an open letter to the current Supreme Court clerks — the guilty and the innocent. I think it’s of interest even if you’re not a retired lawyer who still follows Indiana and Federal Courts.

So who’s stupid now?

Man pleads guilty to felony charge in riot at US Capitol

PHILADELPHIA – A suburban Philadelphia man charged in the January 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol after he was turned in by an ex-girlfriend after reportedly insulting her intelligence for not believing the election had been stolen has pleaded guilty to a felony count. Richard Michetti, 29, of Ridley Park pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Washington to a charge of aiding and abetting obstruction of an official proceeding. Officials said photos showed him inside the Capitol Rotunda. He is to be sentenced Sept. 1.

Wire Service Reports (emphasis added)

Sexual fad du jour

The author provides a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30. Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.

Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity – CSPI Center (H/T Nellie Bowles)

Meanwhile, it’s hard to overestimate the goofiness and downright offensiveness of U.S. efforts to promote Pride Month.

Abortion

An odd, but telling, tid-bit: When the draft Dobbs opinion leaked, the Washington Post opined that reversing Roe would put us out of step with Western Europe. This myopic bit of mythology was so patently wrong that they had to retract or amend: reversing Roe almost certainly would bring us into better alignment with Europe, where legal abortion is more limited than in the U.S. under our juristocracy.

(Sorry I can’t give a link:

  • I heard it on a reliable podcast, but …
  • I’m persona non grata at WaPo; I suspect that never-subscribers can see more free stuff than former-subscribers.)

Guns

For the Record: 10 Cases in Past Year Where Law-Abiding Defenders "Have Stopped Likely Mass Public Shootings" With Guns

Wordplay

the rainforests of the ocean

The Economist’s poetic description of coral reefs.

When you skip the news, life is a lot more like Anne of Green Gables or The House at Pooh Corner.

Garrison Keillor

They were powerful until they were powerless. They lived on probation their entire lives.

Andrew Sullivan on gay life in Washington, DC for about 2/3 of the last century.

I sometimes second-guess my support (Caution: Ancient history ahead! Youngsters may be shocked!) for decriminalizing consensual adult sodomy in the late 60s and thereafter, since the ensuing 50+ years have brought more dubious demands. It’s good to be reminded of why a decision was right, even if it may have, in some sense, "set a bad precedent."

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.

Politics, news, and respite

Politics

Can America and Conservatism co-exist?

I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing.

David Brooks, Conservatism is Dead

Did Biden say the unforgiveable?

Of Biden’s "rhetorical maximalism, accusing the legislators preventing its passage of siding with Bull Connor, George Wallace and Jefferson Davis":

[G]enerally politicians find reasons to forgive or forget when power forces them to do it, and power is what Biden conspicuously lacks right now. Which makes what we’ve just watched from him feel like the worst possible combination for a president — an anger that only reveals weakness, an escalation that exposes only impotence beneath.

Ross Douthat

Time to get disenthralled if you haven’t been already

Responding to the challenge by some of President Trump’s defenders that he didn’t, in fact, directly incite violence, and that the social media bans are therefore unfair, Sullivan counters:

If you want to play legal scholar on that, you can. Okay, go ahead. But at what point are these conservatives gonna recognise what’s in front of them and stop excusing this stuff? It’s insane that people will find any excuse for this person. I’m sorry, I am exhausted. There is no [expletive deleted] way to justify this person in any fashion of any way, whatever the cause. This is an unbelievable breach in American history. And in the West. It’s a huge blow beneath the waterline of Western democracy, fomented by this person, and people are asking me to prove it. I mean, text and verse, look at the last four years. Has he ever tried to hold the system together? Has he ever not tried to blow it further apart? Has he done anything which isn’t about him, rather than the country as a whole?

– Andrew Sullivan, LockdownTV

‌I was right about Donald Trump, an UnHerd interview (emphasis added).

In a piece for National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that, for many of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters, the shine has come off. “While it may be difficult or painful to remember in the year 2022, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in 2015, he was an issue-driven candidate,” Dougherty writes, referring to Trump’s opposition to immigration, interventionism, and entitlement reform. “When he first ran for president, Trump genuinely promised to do things that voters wanted, to make the country great, proud, and prosperous again. Now, he is essentially asking Republicans to do something for him, to restore his tarnished honor and make credible his belief in his own victory. All that is left of Trumpism are Trump’s grievances and aspirations. This is not an agenda that will win him high office, help his party, or accomplish anything for his countrymen.”

The Morning Dispatch

Well-warranted whataboutism

Some crazy-ass proportion of Republicans poll as thinking that Donald Trump won the 2020 Election, which is pretty scary. But a new Rasmussen poll discloses some comparably scary beliefs of Democrats:

  • Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.
  • Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.
  • Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”

COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated

Since I am, by current standards, fully vaccinated and boosted, this is no immediate skin off my nose. But I’m not sure I’ll take another booster if the powers that be decide to triple-down on vaccination.

This is Chapter N in my unwritten book "Why My Leaving the GOP Doesn’t Mean I’m a Democrat Now."*

I know there’s some kind of theoretical case for the marvels of our two-party system, and that every good person should belong to one or the other of them, but I refuse. That may mean I’m too stupid or too lawless for polite society. Maybe both parties can agree to lock me up until I pick my poison.

(* I’ve referred frequently to my leaving the GOP in the middle of Dubya’s Second Inaugural Address. I’m pleased to note that Michael Lind of the Tablet identifies the same delusional moment as a key in Republican recent history: "his commitment of the United States in his Second Inaugural to the messianic project of ‘ending tyranny in our world.’")

Suppose "the steal" were true …

There’s one thing I find odd about Trump’s ability to use election-theft lies to lock down the Republican base: What if the lies were true? Don’t they still make Trump look like an incompetent failure? And doesn’t that provide an opening for a challenger like DeSantis?

Trump’s story about 2020, such as it is, is that he won by a “landslide” but a bipartisan cadre of election officials stole the race from him. He complained a lot about election rule changes like expanded mail-in voting but didn’t stop them. He found shitty lawyers who filed idiotically argued lawsuits too late to matter. He didn’t get the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security to do anything about the alleged conspiracy against him. And people he himself hired didn’t do the things he asked of them to “stop the steal,” going all the way up to Mike Pence.

If you take Trump at his word, it’s not simply that the election was stolen — it’s that the election was stolen and he failed at every turn to stop it, even as he held the powers of the presidency. It’s that all sorts of people he entrusted with power betrayed him and he let them all get away with it. And as a result, Republicans lost control of the government.

How on earth is that a message that says “nominate me again”?

Josh Barro in his new Substack

News

Maybe it’s bullshit the whole way down.

Every morning, there it is, waiting for me on my phone. The bullshit. It resembles, in its use of phrases such as “knowledgeable sources” and “experts differ,” what I used to think of as the news, but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. It consists of its decomposed remains in a news-shaped coffin. It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule.

…

Still, it’s hard to give up hope, and today I blew half an hour on the bullshit, under which the truth lies buried. Maybe. Maybe it’s bullshit the whole way down. How much time do you have for finding out?

Walter Kirn

"Nothing to see here. Move along now.", antisemite edition

After a white-nationalist attack, the media devote considerable resources to tracing the attacker’s ideas and search history along the ideological continuum and tarring the Republican Party with “complicity” in his crimes. After an Islamist attack, the imperative is not to establish politicians’ complicity with the criminal, but to avoid any inquiry that might amount to “Islamophobia.”

‌Anti-Semitism and Double Standards

Bret Stephens makes a similar point.

"Hidden motives"

I can be pretty cynical, but I don’t think that everybody has “hidden motives.” People who write what one might call “pro-Russian” articles for RT aren’t doing it for the money or because the FSB has got some dirt on them any more than people writing Russophobic stuff for think tanks are doing it because they’re taking orders from the FBI, MI5, or CSIS. People tend to believe what they’re doing.

In any case, I worry less about spooks and more about the military industrial complex and its funding of think tanks and the like, all of which work together to inflate threats, keep us in a state of fear, and justify increased defence spending and aggressive foreign policies. But even there, the think tankers etc believe in what they’re doing. The problem is that believers get funded whereas non-believers don’t. I don’t think “hidden motives” are the issue.

Paul Robinson, Irrusianality

That there are no "hidden motives" doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not bullshit, but those who are defying the consensus probably are going to be a bit more certain that they’re right.

Respite

Corporate cancel culture, Elon Musk edition

Cancel culture has definitely escaped from the academic zoo:

A partner at law firm Cooley LLP got an unexpected call late last year from a Tesla Inc. lawyer delivering an ultimatum.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest man, wanted Cooley, which was representing Tesla in numerous lawsuits, to fire one of its attorneys or it would lose the electric-vehicle company’s business, people familiar with the matter said.

Wall Street Journal, ‌Elon Musk’s Tesla Asked Law Firm to Fire Associate Hired From SEC

Cooley, bless ’em, refused and Musk is indeed moving his legal business elsewhere.

Count me a presumptive foe of all things Musk. I didn’t care one whit for Donald Trump 35 years ago (or whenever it was he crashed the national stage with The Art of the Deal) and was baffled by people who admired him, but having seen the heights to which that humbug ascended, I’m even more apprehensive about a bullying narcissist with legitimate wealth (not debt-ridden speculations) and greater intelligence.

The modern machine

Paul Kingsnorth writes much about the machine. I wonder if he first got it from Jacques Ellul?:

Technique is the social structure on which modern life is built. It is the consciousness that has come to govern all human affairs, suppressing questions of ultimate human purposes and meaning. Our society no longer asks why we should do anything. All that matters anymore, [Jacques] Ellul argued, is how to do it — to which the canned answer is always: More efficiently! Much as a modern machine can be said to run on its own, so does the technological society. Human control of it is an illusion, which means we are on a path to self-destruction — not because the social machine will necessarily kill us (although it might), but because we are fast becoming soulless creatures.

Samuel Matlack, ‌How Tech Despair Can Set You Free

Crypto

"Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark," Zawinski told me. "It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy," he said.

Brandon Vigliarolo, ‌Mozilla stops accepting cryptocurrency, Wikipedia may be next: Are dominos falling?

What does the existence of "weld porn" tell us?

There are websites for “weld porn,” and the mere fact that this is so should be of urgent interest to educators. Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Sane and grounded

Elsewhere, advocating for sanity and groundedness, Kari Jenson Gold muses under the somewhat-misleading rubric Jesus the Carpenter. Anyone who liked Shop Class As Soulcraft should take a few minutes for it.

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.

Abortion law, the Performative Jackass Caucus, Race, and more

Abortion Law

Politicization of the Supreme Court

In an exchange with Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general defending the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Sotomayor had this to say:

Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.

…

Here’s what one reader of mine had to say about Justice Sotomayor’s “stench” comment:

Whoever smelt it, dealt it. Sotomayor and Alito are the two most partisan, results-oriented members of the Court. It’s pretty rich of her, of all the justices, to be complaining about politics stinking up SCOTUS—in a soundbite that was clearly crafted to fire up the left.

David Lat, Original Jurisdiction

Abortion and adoption

The last thing we should take from our nation’s debates about abortion is that adoption is a problem.

… the very idea that poverty—in this nation, of all places—could be the factor that causes a mother to part with her child is and should be a clarion call for action, both private and public, designed to facilitate family formation.

David French, Don’t Denigrate Adoption to Defend Roe

Politics, briefly

A guy can dream, can’t he?

GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California is resigning from Congress at the end of the month to become CEO of former President Trump’s new social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group. First elected in 2002, Nunes served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 to 2019, and would have been a contender to lead the House Ways and Means Committee if Republicans recapture the chamber next year.

The Morning Dispatch

This seems like an epic bad career move, but given my opinion of Devin Nunes, he’s certainly welcome to it.

I wonder if Trump can get Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of the GOP Performative Jackass Caucus to come work for him, too?

When the only meaningful correlation involves racial ambivalence

After January 6, a team led by Robert A. Pape, head of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, scoured the profiles of the capital insurgents:

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

Barton Gelman, January 6 Was Practice.

This is a (the?) major article in a brand-new issue of the Atlantic largely devoted to the threat posed by the Trumpist Republican party. Recommended.

I apparently lead a sheltered life. I genuinely thought that frank racism (white people are better than darker people) had faded close to extinction, though I thought it likely that stereotypes remained (e.g., that black English did its speakers no favors in the job and other "markets").

Then came Barack Obama, and with it, birtherism and other unreasoning opposition.

Now, the "replacement theory" and the terrors it incites.

I’ve got to think this stuff was latent all along — just not obviously among my usual circle of mostly-Christian acquaintances.

Other

Root causes

Mark Bauerlein and Tim Perry discuss the deterioration of Christian burial practices, for which Perry finds startling roots:

Bauerlein: You link this deterioration to a bigger conceptual trend, and that is what happened with eschatology in the 20th Century. What went on there?
Perry: I think it’s a twofold story and it’s a little bit ironic. On the one hand, the Church lost its eschatological vocabulary. In the mainstream Protestant Churches and perhaps in the Catholic Church, more immediate concerns came to the fore: keeping the machine going in the days of decreasing revenues, decreasing membership rolls. In the churches that I’ve been shaped in as a child, I think we became a little bit embarrassed at our eschatological excesses, where we stopped talking about the traditional last things — death, judgment, hell and heaven — and started talking instead about secret rapture, great tribulation, who’s the antichrist, what’s the mark of the beast. I think evangelicals have, perhaps rightly, become a little embarrassed at that kind of speech. But instead of going back to the far richer and far more important language of the traditional last things, we’ve just stopped talking about eschatology altogether.

First Things Podcast, A Proper Christian Burial.

Well, I guess if you’re coy about death, judgment, hell and heaven, and allergic to orderly "liturgies," you’ve got little but novelties and pabulum to preach at funerals.

God will never forsake chosen America

This occurs to me so rarely, but seems so fitting when it does, that I thought I should capture it this time: a lot of support for Donald Trump, particularly but not exclusively among Evangelicals, results from fear that Democrats are an existential threat to the country, so they should vote Republican because God would never so forsake (or judge) America that we are left with shitty and unsuitable candidates in both major parties. That simply is unthinkable, since America supposedly is some kind of new chosen people.

I disagree — so much that I’m tempted to cease voting for Democrats or Republicans. That would mean I sit out many individual races. It should send at least a teensie-weensie signal of discontent that some voter in my precinct voted American Solidarity Party in the Presidential race, Libertarian or some other third party where ASP has no candidate, and not a single D or R.

Verbal tics

“Look, I’m an up-front guy,” Bear Hobart said. “I have to be honest with you—” Here it comes, Dylan thought. He was pretty convinced that you didn’t ever have to be honest with someone; maybe you should, and maybe you wanted to, but “I have to be honest with you” was a self-defeating sentence, since it was never true.

Eve Tushnet, Amends

There’s a kindred verbal tic: "Do you realize that you just [e.g., accused all the teachers in this school district of being sexual perverts]?", addressed to one who asks unwelcome questions. The italicized portion is a signal that the speaker is going to twist words beyond recognition in order to paint the initial speaker as some kind of crazy.

Modernity’s faith

“[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity.”

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies

Recently-acquired aphorisms

  • A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. —Edward de Bono, The Mechanism of Mind
  • I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers. —Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

Via Philip Yancey’s Where the Light Fell.

I recommend this memoir (about which I wrote earlier), but read it to understand Yancey’s inner life, not to lay out a timeline of events in U.S. and American church history, which Yancey confuses or conflates at times.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

No Middle Ground

No Middle Ground on Some Things

Kevin D. Williamson’s maiden guest column at the New York Times builds skillfully to his conclusion:

The Trump administration was grotesque in its cruelty and incompetence. But without the coup attempt, it might have been possible to work out a modus vivendi between anti-Trump conservatives and Mr. Trump’s right-wing nationalist-populists. Conservatives were not happy with Mr. Trump’s histrionics, but many were reasonably satisfied with all those Federalist Society judges and his signature on Paul Ryan’s tax bill. Trump supporters, who were interested almost exclusively in theater, enjoyed four years of Twitter-enabled catharsis even as the administration did very little on key issues like trade and immigration.

In the normal course of democratic politics, people who disagree about one issue can work together when they agree about another. We can fight over taxes or trade policy.

But there isn’t really any middle ground on overthrowing the government. And that is what Mr. Trump and his allies were up to in 2020, through both violent and nonviolent means — and continue to be up to today.

When it comes to a coup, you’re either in or you’re out. The Republican Party is leaning pretty strongly toward in. That is going to leave at least some conservatives out — and, in all likelihood, permanently out.

Kevin D. Williamson, ‌The Trump Coup Is Still Raging.

Better late than never, Kevin. I was out at the delusion of "ending tyranny in our world."

The Woke Left gets pushed back

It was a month or so ago, I think, that I first encountered the hopeful suggestion that the woke Left had scored its victories largely via the element of surprise: many people thought wokeness was just another silly campus fad that would stay on campus, but like a zoonotic pathogen, it leapt into a "real world" that had acquired no immunity to it.

The hopeful part is that immunity is surging and that wokesters are starting to get smacked down without any government action. The antibodies are kicking in:

[I]f we can’t intellectually engage people on how critical theory is palpably wrong in its view of the world, we can sure show how brutal and callous it is — and must definitionally be — toward individual human beings in the pursuit of utopia. [HBO’s] “The White Lotus” is thereby a liberal work of complexity and art.

Another sign of elite adjustment: both The Atlantic and The New Yorker have just published long essays that push back against woke authoritarianism and cruelty. Since both magazines have long capitulated to rank illiberalism, this is encouraging …

Anne Applebaum links the woke phenomenon to previous moral panics and mob persecutions, which is where it belongs. She too begins to notice the obliteration of due process, individual rights, and mercy among her crusader peers …

[BLOCK-QUOTE OMITTED]

Applebaum’s Atlantic piece is a good sign from a magazine that hired and quickly purged a writer for wrong think, and once held a town meeting auto-da-fé to decide which writers they would permanently anathematize as moral lepers.

Similarly, it was quite a shock to read in The New Yorker a fair and empathetic profile of an academic geneticist, Kathryn Paige Harden, who acknowledges a role for genetics in social outcomes. It helps that Harden is, like Freddie DeBoer, on the left …

The profile also puts the following woke heresy into the minds of the Upper West Side: “Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.” And this: “Genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.” The New Yorker is also telling its readers that there are around “thirteen hundred sites on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores.”

All of this is empirically true. But if this is empirically true, critical theory, which insists that absolutely nothing but white supremacist society leads to inequalities, is dead in the water. Refuted. Proven false by reality. Finished — even as it continues to be the premise of other countless pieces The New Yorker has run in the past few years …

And then, in the better-late-than-never category, The Economist, the bible for the corporate elite, has just come out unapologetically against the Successor Ideology, and in favor of liberalism … Money quote: “Progressives replace the liberal emphasis on tolerance and choice with a focus on compulsion and power. Classical liberals conceded that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Today’s progressives argue that your freedom to express your opinions stops where my feelings begin.”

Andrew Sullivan, ‌Emerging Cracks In The Woke Elite

I had already read all but the New Yorker piece, and even on that I had read Freddie DeBoer’s comments. And Sullivan continues with more, if more minor, examples of the shifting tide. This is really a hopeful sign.

Now is there any way to smack down the intolerant Right (see previous item), which rivals the woke left in contempt for democracy and which appears more prepared to act in violent paramilitary operations when it doesn’t deliver what they want? (See previous item.)

Hopeful pessimism

Scialabba’s way of reading [Wendell] Berry is not uncommon. As with others whose thinking is hard to locate on the political map, we tend to assume that they must be proposing another map. On this view, Berry’s suggestion to Think Little must be a strategy by which to achieve a better world. Accordingly, we see the dichotomy between Thinking Big and Thinking Little as an alternative theory of how change works: not that way, but this way.

…

It is true that Berry, albeit always an urgent and sometimes an angry writer, does not hitch his prescriptions to the prospects of success. He is something of a hopeful pessimist. And so his “advice,” as Scialabba calls it, though not a strategy for winning, can be described as offering a vision for living with integrity whether or not one wins.

Brad East, ‌When Losing Is Likely

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Our collapse proceeds apace

Shifting the arc of history

The elites kind of have a Martin Luther King, Jr. envy. Every generation want to have that moral quality, that sense that they are shifting the arc of history in a better way, even though we’ve generally done about as much as we possibly can to do that — in terms of within the possibilities (sic) of a liberal system.

Andrew Sullivan, interviewed on the Conversations with Tyler podcast.

"As much as we possibly can … within the possibilities of a liberal system" is perceptive — and ominous, since the impulse for "equity" may consider destruction of our liberal system a very acceptable price to pay.

It’s my hypothesis (in what I’ve called "Selma envy" in parallel with what Sullivan calls it) that part of today’s madness is that progressive organizations that achieve their ultimate objective won’t declare victory, close down, and move on. Instead, they dream up some new objective even when the new objective is, objectively, quite mad.

Most of the trans phenomenon seems to fit that pattern; why didn’t the Human Rights Campaign, for instance, wind up its affairs starting the day after Obergefell? As I recall, Andrew Sullivan — an early and influential proponent of same-sex marriage — has the same question.

Note that "Selma envy" is not meant to demean. The human desire for meaning is strong, and when so many religious options for meaning-formation have fallen into disrepute, both Left and Right may end up in crazy places.

Lex orandi, lex credendi

Michael Brendan Dougherty steps away from the pages of National Review to voice white-hot objection to Pope Francis’ suppression of the Latin Mass.

If I were Roman Catholic, I think his piece would describe my position perfectly.

Of course, that’s a very big "if." Because if I were a Roman Catholic who had subjected himself to the Novus Ordo for decades, and had not availed himself of the Latin Mass during the blessed hiatus in its suppression sanctioned by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum, I might have been "form[ed] … to a new faith," as Dougherty puts it.

This, too:

I learned that the Latin language was not the only distinguishing feature of this form of worship. The entire ritual was different from the post-Vatican II Mass. It wasn’t a mere translation into the modern vernacular; less than 20 percent of the Latin Mass survived into the new.

…

A freshman religious studies major would know that revising all the vocal and physical aspects of a ceremony and changing the rationale for it constitutes a true change of religion. Only overconfident Catholic bishops could imagine otherwise.

Just so. This is why we Orthodox guard our Liturgy (and our Liturgy guards us).

I had written the preceding part when I came across an interesting phrase in Fraces Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape a Nation:

… [Paul] Weyrich, a Catholic so conservative he joined an Eastern Rite church after Vatican II ….

The implication is that the Orthodox Liturgy (used in the Eastern Rite with different diptychs) is more traditionally Catholic than the Novus Ordo.

That’s not wrong.

Institutions, internet, information

[T]hose who love the [Roman Catholic] Church’s traditions and choose to believe that she is truly the “perfect society” have, in actuality, zero power to preserve or protect her. They are left, therefore, with no choice but to obey papal innovations and be crushed, or to rebel against them, and thereby become the very opposite of what they espouse. Obedience to everything but sin is what the tradition recommends; rebellion against an unjust but not immoral order is anything but traditional.

Steve Skojec, Casual Saints and The De-Mythologizing of the Church – The Skojec File. H/T Rod Dreher.

Dreher continues on the corrosive difficulty of maintaining trust in institutions — any institutions — in the Information Age:

[I]t is certainly true that our governmental and health authorities have not covered themselves with glory in their management of information around Covid … [W]hen we saw last summer health authorities saying that it was okay to cast aside their warnings against public gatherings, for the sake of attending George Floyd protests, that instantly discredited them in the eyes of many of us. These things really do matter. At the same time public health authorities are giving warnings about Covid, and liberals are demanding that we TRUST THE SCIENCE, we are seeing things like the American Medical Association say that we should do away with “male” and “female” on birth certificates, because sex doesn’t exist. Now, it is perfectly possible that medical authorities could be telling the truth about how to deal with Covid, and be completely bonkers and politicized about sex and gender. But normal people see how quickly doctors are falling for the trendy ideologization of medicine, and wonder how much they can be trusted on anything.

Similarly, it is entirely possible that school systems are correct to mandate masks for students coming back to school in the time of the Delta variant. But when many school systems are also mandating teaching of radical neoracist ideologies based on Critical Race Theory, normal people can’t be faulted for doubting the judgment of those authorities.

I could cite examples all day. The point is this: authority is not the same thing as power. An institution that has squandered its authority has nothing left but power. And if it doesn’t have power to coerce others — as in today’s churches — what does it have? If it does have the power to coerce others, including those who don’t accept its authority, it risks being or becoming a tyranny.

You could say that the total information environment is good in that it compels institutions to become more honest and competent. Maybe. But humans are not machines. We are going to fail. If we live in a society where people regard all human failure as malicious, and freak out completely in the face of it, we aren’t going to make it. …

(Emphasis added)

Relative dangers, Left and Right

Wokesters, a/k/a the Successor Ideology, is the current and is like a low-stage cancer, and the body politic has awakened to their presence and is responding. Left illiberalism has lost the element of surprise (surprise that it so swiftly leapt from the Ivy Tower to the street), and faces increasing resistance in the culture.

The more radically Trumpist Right, is an institutional disinformation organization, "flooding the zone with shit" about "rigged" elections and either violently seizing power or having red-state legislatures replace Democrat electoral winners with Republican losers. That’s more like an impending massive heart attack.

(Summarizing a portion of Monday’s Advisory Opinions podcast with Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge.)

This was an excellent discussion, including Rauch’s admiration for NIH head Francis Collins, who led the mapping of the human genome and is a faithful Christian. Looking at the considerable numbers of thoughtful believers in contrast to his contentedly-atheist self, Rauch hypothesizes that his atheism is perhaps like color-blindness.

That seems like a pretty good analogy, in part because a person who isn’t color-blind cannot with integrity deny the distinction between, say, red and green.

20 Hungarian Lessons the West Is Still Missing

There has been a lot of stupid, stupid stuff written about Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and some admirers on the American Right. 20 Hungarian Lessons the West Is Still Missing is a smart, balanced, longish piece written by Eric D’Amato, who knows Hungary well from 15 years there.

It’s embarrassing that so little commentary comes anywhere near this level, but I guess there must be loudly stupid things written on minor topics before there’s a market for smart ones.

Afghan collapse

After a long quote from a bitter, bitter blog from an ex-soldier who deployed twice to Afhanistan, Rod Dreher demurs just a teensy bit:

I think Joe Biden deserves criticism for the terrible way his administration handled the endgame. But Joe Biden didn’t lose this war. This war was lost not the day George W. Bush decided to attack Afghanistan — the Taliban government deserved it for harboring Osama bin Laden — but rather on the day that George W. Bush decided that we were going to nation-build in Afghanistan.

Dreher then goes on to quote a 2002 column that predicted, with what we now can all see was extreme accuracy, how our Afghanistan adventure could not and would not end well.

The neocon hatred for paleocons like Pat Buchanan, the author of that 2002 column, knows no bounds. I look forward to David Frum, one of the former, writing a ‘splainer in the Atlantic on how the débâcle is all Buchanan’s fault for not joining the imperialist cheer squad.

And I should add that Donald J. Trump, in addition to appointing a bunch of very good Federal judges (all of whom, remarkably, have "betrayed" him by staying faithful to their oaths of office) deserves credit for not starting any more of these perverse wars, as he promised (or at least implied) he wouldn’t.

Adiaphora

Andrew Cuomo Resigned Because the Democrats Aren’t a Cult
Normal political parties can police their own.

Benjamin Parker

Andrew Cuomo’s resignation shows 1 party is still capable of shame

Damon Linker. Linker continues:

Within hours of the attorney general’s press conference last week, the president of the United States, leading Democrats in Washington, and key members of the New York State Assembly had called on Cuomo to step down. With polls showing a majority favoring resignation, pressure in Albany mounting, and defenders dwindling, attempting to hang on would have been maximally risky. That made Cuomo’s decision a no-brainer.

The contrast with the Republican Party couldn’t be sharper.

Since Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the party in 2016, the GOP has adopted an ethos of merciless bellicosity. Fighting is what counts and what gets rewarded. Sacrificing for the sake of principle is denigrated and dismissed. To resign is to give up power voluntarily. It’s therefore a choice reserved only for suckers and chumps.

Add in the cult of personality that has accompanied this shift in moral orientation and we’re left with a party overwhelmingly predisposed to forgive transgressions of the most charismatic and politically potent members of the team.

There was a time when I said I listened to NPR news because it made me feel at least a little bit smarter, whereas most network and radio news was stultifying.

Well, I haven’t been listening to much news, but I went back to NPR today, only to be teased for a story on the increasing hospitalization rates for "pregnant people" with Covid.

It’s weird when no broadcast news is helpful. I’ve heard that BBC World News remains excellent, but they spend so much time on in-depth stories from halfway around the world — stories that (this probably means I’m a bad person) just are not all that keenly interesting to me.

Sex-Toy Makers Lovehoney, WOW Tech Merge in $1.2 Billion Deal as Lockdowns Spur Demand
Germany’s WOW Tech Group and U.K.-based Lovehoney said they have agreed to merge in a deal that values the combined company at around $1.2 billion, as the pandemic helps fuel global demand for sex toys.

I guess if you’re the Wall Street Journal, you report all kinds of business news. (August 12 digital edition). It makes one excited at the news possibilities should prostitution be legalized.

Here is the evidence that trans women are really women, and that trans men are really men: They say they are. This has been confirmed in study after study. So stop opposing Science, bigots.

J Budziszewski

I have had it with Rand Paul.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Potpourri 6/6/21

Russell Moore and the Southern Baptists

I will not comply with another secret task force meant to silence me about issues I believe are issues of obedience to Christ. I will not sign another “unity” statement meant to “call off the dogs” of scrutiny so that the beatings may begin again in private. If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to be part of a house of prayer for all peoples, then that’s what I signed up for. If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to be one big retirement home for a furious royal family, then, that’s not what I signed up for.

…

When God called me to himself in Jesus, and when he called me to serve him in ministry, he called me to stand for the truth, to point the way to the kingdom, to die to self, and to carry the cross. He did not call me to provide cover for racial bigotry and child molestation.

Russell Moore, to the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Freedom Trustees, February 2020. And now they’ve lost him — forced him to resign or formed another secret task force or something. He not only left his position; he left the Southern Baptist Convention entirely.

The knives are out already, but it sounds as if the knives were out before he left the SBC, too.

David French is quite interested in all this:

Late last month, Religion News reported that the SBC has lost a stunning 435,632 members since its 2020 annual report. Some of those individuals have left for other churches. Some have left the faith entirely.

Why? It’s not hard to analyze. A tolerance for predation and corruption demonstrates no fear of God. A pervasive fear of the world (or “the left”) demonstrates no faith in God. Brazen abusers disregard God’s justice. Fearful believers behave as if the Maker of the heavens and earth needs corrupt politicians or corrupt pastors to preserve his people’s presence in this land.

I can’t put it better than Russell Moore. Writing in April, shortly before his departure from the SBC, Moore said young Evangelicals are “walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” In other words, young Americans are saying to church leaders, “Why should I believe when you so obviously do not?”

One last point. It’s hard to overemphasize how much the church’s defensiveness is at odds with the imperative of repentance. Standing in front of the world, when undeniable scandals rock so many of our most important institutions, and declaring, “We’re better than you think” is the opposite of a penitent spirit.

David French, Russell Moore’s Warnings Should Bring a Reckoning

I probably — no, almost certainly — still spend too much time wallowing in the news despite a very great and intentional reduction of news consumption. Clickbait is effective more often than I like to admit. I really should be more like Gary:

I am going to focus on what I hear directly from people I know. I know two women who recently gave birth to their first babies and are joyful and so are their men and that is real news. A grandson is starting college. A daughter is moving. A friend has finished a novel. A widowed friend, marrying again at 84, writes to say he is well and adds, “And it’s none of your business but the sex is great.” A cousin attended a graduation ceremony at a school for intellectually disabled children and one poor graduate stammered through a speech of which little could be understood and the crowd clapped all the harder for him.

Life Goes On. That’s the news …

I believe in a fraction of what I was taught, my faith wavers … But I do believe that when Jesus, surrounded by the sick and impoverished and oppressed, the blind and demon-possessed, said to his disciples, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do for me and your Father in heaven,” he spoke the truth, and if you wish for some truth in your life, along with your interesting attitudes and opinions, this is the one to go for.

Garrison Keillor

With the benefit of hindsight, I see that much of Evangelicalism was (is?) about ginning up emotions, and affirming happiness as if saying it could make it true, and recruitment of others ("evangelism") as a kind of MLM buttress to one’s own faith. These days, I’ll take a humble faith like Garrison Keillor expresses here over any of that.

It’s not that my own faith is quite as weak as his — if he has a mustard seed, I’ve maybe got a corn kernel — but that all that emotional jag brought me no closer to God and distracted me from things that might.

It feels as if it could be a good time for Orthodox Churches to start advertising:

Sick of Evangelicalism but can’t shake Jesus? Come and see.

("Come and see" isn’t just for "exvangelicals," but I think, perhaps naïvely, that they have a relatively high proportion of "can’t shake Jesus" folks.)

TFPOTUS

1

In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)

Alan Jacobs

I, too, did not trust Trump to fulfill any campaign promise, however explicit and solemn.

2

Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen — which it is absolutely not — his belief would still be absurd. It could be confirmed tomorrow that agents working for a combination of al-Qaeda, Venezuela, and George Soros had hacked into every single voting machine in the country and altered the totals by tens of millions, and it would remain the case there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort. In such an eventuality, there would be indictments, an impeachment drive, and a constitutional crisis. But, however bad it got, Donald Trump would not be “reinstated” to the presidency. That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.

There is nothing to be gained for conservatism by pretending otherwise. To acknowledge that Trump is living in a fantasy world does not wipe out his achievements or render anything else he has said incorrect. It does not endorse Joe Biden or hand the Republican Party over to Bill Kristol or knock down an inch of the wall on the border. It merely demands that Donald Trump be treated like any other person: subject to gravity, open to rebuttal, and liable to be laughed at when he becomes so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him.

Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review

3

On August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog.

Scott Adams, Win Bigly

"… based on his persuasion skills"?! Trump is to persuasion as a rapist is to seduction.

Undermined democracy

I … consider the GOP’s efforts to use various institutional tricks to win maximal power while failing to win popular majorities or even pluralities to be civically corrosive — and its Trump-inspired flirtation with outright defiance of the results of free and fair elections genuinely dangerous.

But in truth, I don’t simply, or even mainly, fear these developments because I see authoritarianism on the horizon (to paraphrase the headlines of countless opinion columns over the past few months). I fear them far more because such efforts are an expression of political desperation — the actions of a party that considers losing unacceptable. I also fear them because they will drive Democrats to their own acts of desperation, which will justify more Republican panic which will justify more Democratic alarm — with all of it, on both sides, motivated by the intensifying conviction that the only legitimate outcome is for one’s own party to rule uncontested.

Partisan disagreement over policy and even zero-sum cultural disputes are one thing. But liberal democracy — self-government, the system itself — only works if the rules for the alternation of political power are considered legitimate by everyone. What just a few years ago was a sharply polarized partisan environment is now rapidly becoming a battle over these common rules, with the two parties no longer able to reach or maintain consensus about what those rules should be, about what should be considered legitimate.

Damon Linker

If you don’t like the Religious Right …

America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community. You’re suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet to whom you’re joined at the brain. They see the world the way you do; it is a very intimate connection.

Church affiliation and practice have been falling for decades, but people always have a spiritual hole inside, and if God can’t fill it, Q will do.

Peggy Noonan, What Drives Conspiracism (no pay wall)

Never forget the memorable saying: "If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right."

Cruelty is here to stay

I promise you that every single day high school students are absolutely savage to each other. What’s more, human nature being what it is, I’m sure that they now do so explicitly utilizing the politicized and therapeutic language that proponents of social justice norms foolishly assume is an antidote to that bad behavior. Because interpersonal cruelty is a universal aspect of the human condition and any philosophy can be bent to its use. This condition can perhaps at times be ameliorated but it can never be eliminated and learning this reality is an important part of growing up. Cruelty is here to stay.

Freddie deBoer, At the Heart of It All

I left the GOP when Dubya delusionally declared it our national policy to eradicate tyranny from the world. One of many reasons why I haven’t become Democrat is that they’re just as delusional about hate, cruelty, bullying and such.

As others see us

We had great conversation about the political and cultural situation here, and in the world. I heard some of the same sadness about America’s self-destruction that I’ve been hearing in Budapest. One of my dining companions said, “Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t really care if America destroys itself. I worry that it’s going to destroy us too.”

“Yes,” said the man across the table. “Everything that starts in America eventually comes here.”

Rod Dreher, reporting from Bucharest

Invisible Revolution

I always thought that if you lived through a revolution it would be obvious to everyone. As it turns out, that’s not true. Revolutions can be bloodless, incremental and subtle. And they don’t require a strongman. They just require a sufficient number of well-positioned true believers and cowards, like those sitting in the C-suite of nearly every major institution in American life.

That’s one of the lessons I have learned over the past few years as the institutions that have upheld the liberal order — our publishing houses, our universities, our schools, our non-profits, our tech companies — have embraced a Manichean ideology that divides people by identity and punishes anyone that doesn’t adhere to every aspect of that orthodoxy.

Bari Weiss, introducing a long guest essay on Manichean medicine by Katie Herzog.

We must do something. Scapegoating is something.

"What we have to do is make these attacks so costly and painful for the bad guys that they decide the rewards aren’t worth it,” [AEI’s Klon] Kitchen continued. “And specifically, we have to change the political calculus of government leaders like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."

The Morning Dispatch

Whenever Mrs. Kissel breaks wind we beat the dog.

The Vicar in the movie 10‌.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Miscellany, 4/23/21

For many years now it has been crystal clear to me that the shape of reality is the shape of a myth, not a hard drive, and that the path back to understanding it – the way out of the cul de sac of Machine modernity – is a spiritual one.

Paul Kingsnorth, Intermission: The Empty Throne (The Abbey of Misrule)

First, I’d like to say I’m not surprised by much today, but I was taken aback by the rage in some parts of the right at the conviction of Derek Chauvin …

I could fill an entire newsletter with strange and dangerous reactions from prominent right-wing voices after the Chauvin verdict. The pathologies of right-wing infotainment are one reason why I have so little patience for most of the right’s relentless criticism of the mainstream media. Somehow, in all their rage and fury, they’ve created a competing media ecosystem that’s actually worse than the institutions they hate. Take the log out of your own eye.

But then, over in Ohio, many of the biggest public figures and news outlets in America got busy reminding us exactly why so many in the right feel such deep frustration. They reminded us why it’s often accurate to critique left-wing media narratives, especially when it’s obvious that those narratives will force people to deny or to ignore the witness of their eyes just as thoroughly as the far-right ignored the witness of their own eyes in the Chauvin trial.

The police shooting of 15-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was tragic and deeply, deeply sad. It was also nothing like the police murder of George Floyd. Yet immediately important voices tied the deaths together ….

David French, Don’t Create False Villains To Serve a Greater Good. I boldfaced the part that made me want to stand up and cheer, but felt obliged to provide the context, too.

… the Politician’s Fallacy: we need to do something; this is something; therefore we need to do this. There’s lots of racism in the workplace, no doubt. So the answer is to… pay businesses millions of dollars to come and preemptively scold bored employees who are only attending these workshops out of coercion? That’s the solution? Seems like a great way for a few people to get rich, but sure doesn’t seem like it’ll do jack shit to actually reduce workplace racism. Also… you get that employers pay for these things purely because they can use them as evidence that they have not created a racially discriminatory workplace in the event that they get sued, right? So Robin Diangelo’s business is literally making it harder for employees of color to get financial compensation for being the victims of discrimination. Cool, cool, cool. Anti-racism!

Ah, but I’m questioning a progressive and anti-racist and her worldview (and hustle), so I am surely just a classic Substack guy. When you can’t object to anything at all, lest you be consigned to the list of “anti-cancel culture guys,” you can’t ask if things make sense, if the tactics people in the social justice world endorse actually do what they’re meant to do. The point is to build an actually-more just world, right? So we have to figure out what actually works. I don’t begrudge people who are casting around for solutions to entrenched problems. But it’s not enough for a solution to have good intentions. It has to actually be a solution. To figure out if something actually is a solution you have to have an internal debate. You have to ask tough questions – not “just asking questions” but actual hard questions that stem from the world being a complicated place. But you can’t do that if you insist that any internal criticism is a con or a way to show allegiance to the alt-right.

This is the culture that liberals have created: asking “is this really going to make the world more just?” is itself impermissible. You aren’t allowed to ask if tactics work anymore! Ask David Shor. Do riots help Black people? We’ll never know. Racist even to ask, I’m told. Hard questions are not permitted ….

Freddie deBoer, Cynical Motives for a Cynical Time.

The Maxine Waters Problem
When America’s officials desert any standards for public or personal behavior, expect violence.

Those were the un-ironic headline and sub headline for a Daniel Heninger editorial in the Wall Street Journal on April 22. There was no mention in the editorial of Donald Trump or the violent storming of the U.S. Capital on January 6.

A strange thing has happened: I no longer enjoy the Wall Street Journal Opinion page. I still enjoy the Journal, though, for straight reporting — just about the straightest major newspaper reporting available today.

I only regret that WSJ mostly finds "newsworthy" stories about business and finance.

No, that’s not true. I even more regret that it dare not notice the signs that we’re headed for another bubble burst. Irrational optimism is more marketable.

Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

…

The fact that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and other institutions.

Rod Dreher, after long block-quote of David Brooks

Providing poor and minority families the same choice of schools that their wealthier neighbors enjoy is the purest example of ‘social justice’ in our society today.

Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, quoted by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.

When I was a Calvinist, I had a young friend who was working on his PhD and then went on to become an academic in a well-regarded Christian college. So even though I had become Orthodox in the meantime, I eagerly bought a book he co-authored — a book about "Church."

What a revelation! It was difficult to find any common ground with this, for instance:

There is no single correct way of doing and being church. Trying not to be like other churches is, of course, just another conception and idealization, albeit a pathological one. While our prophetic visions of church should help us see where churches are not boasting solely in Jesus, they too often boast in themselves, and they justify their “correctness” by letting others know how they are not like “incorrect” models of church.

Thinking one has a "prophetic vision[] of church" according to which the church should be re-fashioned is just not on my radar any more — not as friendly forces, at least.

Luther once declared from the pulpit that he could commit adultery one hundred times in a day and it would not affect his justification before God.

Kimberly Hahn and Scott Hahn, Rome Sweet Home

I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer.

Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome!

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer.

Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome!

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.