On proper love of country

Love of country or “nationalism”?

Most of what is written about Christian nationalism is silly. Critics and analysts sweepingly deride conventional Christian conservatives as Christian nationalists. By some counts, there are, by this definition, tens of millions of Christian nationalists. Sometimes even civil religion, with its homage to a vague deity, is labeled Christian nationalism. If so, all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden are Christian nationalists. Sometimes the target is folk religionists who conflate God and country. They sometimes sport paraphernalia with American flags draped around the cross. These folk religionists typically aren’t aware they are Christian nationalists. They don’t publish articles, much less books. And they typically don’t have policy agendas, just an attitude that God and country should be interchangeably honored.

…

Christian nationalism is distinct from conventional Christian conservatism. The former are typically post-liberals who want some level of explicit state established Christianity. The latter have been and largely still are classical liberals who affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all. Both groups want a “Christian America.” But the former want it by statute. The latter see it as mainly a demographic, historical and cultural reality.

Mark Tooley, Christian Conservatism vs Christian Nationalism

This looks like a solid and helpful piece from a more religiously-sophisticated source than the Politico piece it’s responding to. But it seems to me superficial insofar as it’s credulous about “nations.”

Not this:

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

…

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The conveniently unknown God

For fifty years I worshipped at the shrine of an Unknown God. It’s better than nothing. This tells us something of the intrinsic nature of humans. That we are wired to adore. It’s been a deception that we can get along without bending our heads, or ‘think’ our way out of our essential religiosity …

I lit candles for the Unknown God, coaxed exotic incense, sought out quiet places, wrapped myself in antelope skins and read ancient texts, hundreds of them. I got myself out into the bush, I abandoned work without real substance, I became a scholar and a seeker. I lived in a circle for four years, no screens anywhere near me. I blew my lantern out early and woke to birdsong. I was devoted, and I was led.

But I would tell by the camp fire every story but the story. The vast, glorious, uneasy elephant in the room.

I loved the Unknown God because it seemed beautiful, ancient, intensely mysterious, but didn’t infringe on how I actually lived. Not if I didn’t want it to. Had no bearing on my ethics or morality – what there was left of them. I dwelt in a world of strong emotion, intuitions and elaborate ceremonies. I learnt an awful lot about being human. I learnt an awful lot about the value of beauty.

And yet, I remained absolutely unaccountable. At the flick of a switch I could be the same old degenerate I’d always been …

Those fifty years got me an awfully long way. They’ve enabled me languages and experiences that gird me well in middle age. They haven’t required abandoning, or disowning, or shamefully chucking on a bonfire. I was a Romantic, that was what I was. But if you’ve really committed to a quest, a day will come when everything you think you know gets rocked, challenged, shaken. That happened to me four years ago up in the forest at the end of a 101-day vigil. When the unthinkable happened.

My unknown God decided to make himself visible to me.

Known to me.

Martin Shaw.

A bit of lay history

Clause not yet adopted at Rome … omitted from manuscripts of the Creed … inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m … Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes … but only adopted among the Franks … Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!’ He paused and rubbed his hands. ‘I wish I’d been there!’ He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. ‘Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne – a Frank, of course! – but approves of the doctrine.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water. Patrick Leigh Fermor is not where I expected to find a saucy account of where the filioque came from.

Untenable but appealing

To read [Elaine] Pagels and [Bart]Ehrman, the Jesus Seminarians, and many others, the reader would think that orthodox interpretation of the Christian story has no claim to greater antiquity, and no stronger connection to the first followers of Christ, than the many and various heretical interpretations. In their view, the New Testament reflects only the theological-ideological biases of the “proto-orthodox” party, and the canon as we know it was imposed retrospectively, rather than developing organically in the early Church. These claims are enormously appealing to the modern religious mind, but they aren’t particularly tenable.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Iconodules

A key turning point in my life, during my thesis (“The Icon as Theology”) defense, came with the question, “Do you believe the veneration of icons to be necessary to salvation?” I hesitated (I was an Anglican priest at the time), and responded, “I believe that their veneration is necessary to its fullness.” I have lived with that answer for many years and pondered it and the question as well. Christ, according to the Scriptures, is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). I cannot imagine a salvation that is somehow separate from the veneration, indeed, the worship of that Icon.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

On “calling”

Florida’s most notorious abortion clinic is located at 1103 Lucerne Terrace in downtown Orlando. On the sidewalk directly in front of this clinic, the Orlando Women’s Center, there are two prominent marks in the concrete. They are signs of an extraordinary story.

The concrete was worn away by the feet of John Barros, who for nearly two decades stood outside this clinic as a sidewalk counselor …

I asked him, once, how he’d felt called to the pro-life movement. “I wasn’t called to the pro-life movement,” he replied. “God called me to forty feet of sidewalk.”

Farewell to a Pro-Life Hero

The new Christendom’s penitential system was often experienced as external to the needs of the penitent. It was based on new patterns of canon law that codified sin and the penances that negated it. The system could be overwhelmingly legalistic and for some authorities was centered not on the penitent but on his clerical confessor. It was concerned more with divine satisfaction than with human transformation.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia. The “new Christendom” Strickland is referring to is Western Christendom after the Great Schism of roughly 1,000 years ago. Human transformation remains the focus of confession, absolution and penance in the Christian East (and in American Orthodoxy).

Anecdote contra data

Writing on X, a priest reports: “A bit of good news . . . I’ve had more confessions of the ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it’s been 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years since my last confession . . .’ sort this year than I ever remember. I’m seeing more people at Mass than I ever remember.”

R.R. Reno

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Purdue at Rutgers

I have nothing to say about basketball. That title is just my answer to the question “how is this Saturday different than all others?”

Update: Purdue plays Rutgers Sunday the 28th. I blew that.

Culture

Fairy tales

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

G.K. Chesterton, writing the original lines, in Tremendous Trifles, Book XVII: The Red Angel (1909)

If Hef had died eight days later

Half the trick of business is knowing when to get out, and Hugh Hefner was a great businessman. “His timing was perfect,” said the New York Times obituary, when he died in September 2017 … But the obituarist was more right about Hefner’s timing than she could have known. Eight days after his death, the same paper published its devastating expose of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults against women, and the #MeToo movement quickly assembled in response. You can’t exactly call it luck when a 91-year-old dies, but if Hefner had lasted two weeks longer, the memorials would have been far harsher judgement about his influence on the 20th century.

Sarah Ditum, Crystal Hefner came too late.

(Beyond that nice lead-in, there’s not an awful lot to see in Ditum’s article. Take it or leave it.)

Right-Wing Progressives

Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.

RWPs are what Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, approvingly dubbed “dynamists”: individuals whose primary vision for a good society is a state of constant Promethean invention, discovery, growth, and transformation. They see their true enemies as what Postrel labels “stasists”: nostalgia-ridden, backwards-looking brutes who hate change and for some unimaginable reason want to keep everything old and therefore obsolete from being replaced by new and better things. Today, from the RWP’s point of view, the forces of stasism just happen to include the Woke left in addition to conservatives.

N.S. Lyons, The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives

Cute. Maybe even valuable (if you’re a sucker for clickbait)

Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean. The concept is amusing and the webpage thus worth a view.

The arts

The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.

David Brooks, * How Art Creates Us*

Substack Nazis

Virtue signalling on Substack

[I]t’s … my belief in original sin that makes me skeptical of one particular kind of story: the “Doing this hurts me but darn it I simply must stand up for my principles” story — which is the tale that a number of former Substackers are telling these days. “Substack is great for me but I simply can’t be on the same platform with all these Nazis” — though as many people have pointed out, Substack has maybe half a dozen Nazis among its zillions of users, and none of the platforms these people are decamping for are Nazi-free either.

Here’s what I believe: This has absolutely nothing to do with Nazis. The purpose of the campaign is not to expel Nazis from Substack but to create a precedent. If Substack said “Okay, the Nazis are gone, the response would not be “Thanks!” It would be, “Cool, now let’s talk about Rod Dreher.” And then Bari Weiss, and then Jesse Singal, and then Freddie DeBoer, etc. etc. The goal is not to eliminate Nazis; the goal is to reconstitute the ideological monoculture that Substack, for all its flaws — it’s not a service I would ever use —, has effectively disrupted.

Alan Jacobs.

It’s especially affirming that Jacobs lists three Substackers I subscribe to plus one I dropped fewer that two weeks ago (because his logorrheic posts have what feels like a very low signal-to-noise ratio).

A lighter touch

Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?

Megan McArdle, on the absurdity of “Nazis on Substack.” H/T Andrew Sullivan

Legalia

The judge-made doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes a mockery of our civil rights laws, over and over and over again, as police get away with outrages. Judge Don Willet is fed up with it:

[O]ne of the justifications so frequently invoked in defense of qualified immunity—that law enforcement officers need “breathing room” to make “split-second judgments”—is altogether absent in this case. This was no fast-moving, high-pressure, life-and-death situation. Those who arrested, handcuffed, jailed, mocked, and prosecuted Priscilla Villarreal, far from having to make a snap decision or heat-of-the-moment gut call, spent several months plotting Villarreal’s takedown, dusting off and weaponizing a dormant Texas statute never successfully wielded in the statute’s near-quarter-century of existence. This was not the hot pursuit of a presumed criminal; it was the premeditated pursuit of a confirmed critic.

Also, while the majority says the officers could not have “predicted” that their thought-out plan to lock up a citizen-journalist for asking questions would violate the First Amendment—a plan cooked up with legal advice from the Webb County District Attorney’s Office, mind you—the majority simultaneously indulges the notion that Villarreal had zero excuse for not knowing that her actions might implicate an obscure, never-used provision of the Texas Penal Code. In other words, encyclopedic jurisprudential knowledge is imputed to Villarreal, but the government agents targeting her are free to plead (or feign) ignorance of bedrock constitutional guarantees.

In the upside-down world of qualified immunity, everyday citizens are demanded to know the law’s every jot and tittle, but those charged with enforcing the law are only expected to know the “clearly established” ones. Turns out, ignorance of the law is an excuse—for government officials. Such blithe “rules for thee but not for me” nonchalance is less qualified immunity than unqualified impunity. The irony would be sweet if Villarreal’s resulting jailtime were not so bitter, and it lays bare the “fair warning” fiction that has become the touchstone of what counts as “clearly established law.”

H/T Eugene Volokh

Politics

Scene: The US Senate, January 6, 2025

Having so recently pledged not to blog about Donald Trump, I find myself needing to clarify that pledge: it does not extend to commenting on procedures by which we elect presidents.

Which brings me to this stunner:

[N]o matter how the Court rules in Trump v. Anderson [the Colorado ballot excusion of Trump], do not expect Senate President Kamala Harris or a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, on January 6, 2025, to count electoral votes cast for Donald Trump who all Democrats believe is disqualified from being re-elected as President by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will not feel bound to follow the ruling of a Republican Supreme Court. And, that is even without factoring in the likelihood that Trump will be convicted of at least some of the 91 charges on which he has been indicted and that he may lose the popular vote even if he wins in the Electoral College.

Do I think this would be unfair and wrong as a matter of constitutional law? Of course, I do! I, after all, signed a brief by three former Republican Attorneys General in Trump v. Anderson saying that Donald Trump is not barred from being re-elected by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. But, if you want to know what Democrats think about this, and what they will do on January 6, 2025, take the time to read Yale Sterling Professor of Law Akhil Reed Amar’s amicus brief, co-written with his brother Vikram, in Trump v. Anderson. The Amar brothers think a Democratic President of the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House are not bound by the Republican Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson. I would be stunned if all of legal academia and the press did not end up agreeing with them along with some conservative legal academics. So, even if Donald Trump were to win in the Electoral College in 2024, Kamala Harris and the House of Representatives would not count his electoral votes. There is simply no way that Donald Trump can win the 2024 presidential election.

Steven Calabresi, who I don’t think is a “Democrats are utterly evil” nut-case.

So imagine January 6, 2021 in reverse. Mob or not (and if the Dems talk about it in advance, there will be a mob or two or four …), the Senate may do what Mike Pence refused to do: throw out electoral votes for the opposing party. And they’ve got one legal heavyweight behind them already, not a John Eastman whispering deranged theories in secret.

If the Senate does that, all bets on a swell coming decade or two are off. Better for the Country would be that Biden win fair and square. Best of all (I suspect, but dare not pray): that Providence remove both of the geriatric candidates from the race, and soon.

The Republican Party is now useless for conservatives

Accepting Dobbs as the long-term compromise [on abortion] at the federal level is desirable and necessary for reasons unrelated to the abortion issue itself. My own belief—as a pro-lifer and a conservative who also cares a great deal about the rest of the conservative agenda—is that the Republican Party is a lost cause. Right-wing populists–the people who now dominate the GOP–ultimately have no enduring interests beyond symbolic culture war skirmishing and maintaining long-term welfare benefits and other economic subsidies important to white people (SNAP and other programs associated rightly or wrongly with nonwhite urbanites will be on the chopping block, while Social Security and Medicare must be held sacrosanct and corporate welfare remains popular). A new center-right coalition will have to be forged, and a party organized to support it, if conservative policies are to be advanced by democratic and legislative means. The Republican Party is no longer available, in a practical sense, as a vehicle for those purposes.

Kevin D. Williamason

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.

Conservatisms

I’m a David Brooks kind of conservative …

Every once in a while, David Brooks writes something that makes me want to say “I’m a David Brooks kind of conservative.” This was one of those times:

How do you stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole in brutalizing times? How do you prevent yourself from becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized?

Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart.

The ancient Greeks knew about violent times. They lived with frequent wars between city-states, with massacres and mass rape. In response, they adopted a tragic sensibility. This sensibility begins with the awareness that the crust of civilization is thin. Breakdowns into barbarism are the historic norm. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re living in some modern age, too enlightened for hatred to take over.

In these circumstances, everybody has a choice. You can try to avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naïvely wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write centuries later, “Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” And that goes for great women, too.

This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways. First, it teaches a sense of humility …

Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off …

Third, this tragic mentality encourages caution. …

Fourth, the tragic mentality teaches people to be suspicious of their own rage. …

Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. …

So far, I’ve been describing the cool, prudent and humble mentality we learn from the Athenians. Now I turn to a different mentality, a mentality that emerged among the great Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: the act of leading with love in harsh times.

… During a recent Zoom call, someone asked me: Isn’t it dangerous to be vulnerable toward others when there is so much bitterness, betrayal and pain all around? My answer to that good question is: Yes, it is dangerous. But it is also dangerous to be hardened and calloused over by hard times. It is also dangerous, as C.S. Lewis put it, to guard your heart so thoroughly that you make it “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

David Brooks, Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms.

… but I’m not deaf to Wendell Berry conservatism

I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.

This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited by voters for Trump who are “animated most intensely by feelings of racial resentment or male self-pity,” and by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.” Mr. Burns is a political expert, who writes from a posture of authority, but his authority comes from no close acquaintance with rural places or with Trump voters or with people of the working class. He identifies only two reasons rural people might have had for voting for Trump, without asking, for instance, why they might have voted against Clinton or Biden. And he says that working-class voters “feel” victimized, apparently without considering that they may “feel” so because they know so. He might have added that many of them know also that they are disregarded or disdained by another set of elites who think them ignorant because they have not been to college. This is a prejudice, resting upon a cruel and extremely destructive falsehood of the same kind as white supremacy. To be fair, or at least more complete, Mr. Burns might have added to his collection of deplorables the rural voters who vote for Democrats only because the Democrats are not Republicans.

…

Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use. I have not made a “survey,” but I have read enough to know that Alexander Burns’s article is conventional. Like his fellow experts, he appears to assume the inexhaustibility of the non-human world, and likewise the forever availability of the rural and working-class humans who do, well or poorly, the fundamental work of every economy. Like most of his fellow experts, he consents to and takes for granted the corporate destruction of the land and the human communities of rural America.

…

My impression is that the writers of the articles I have read have never ventured into rural America to ask in good faith what the problems are and what might be the remedies. And so I have made a sort of practice also of inviting writers and editors to come here where I live to allow me (and some younger people) to show them what we are up against. So far, nobody has showed up.

Wendell Berry

Trump officials against Trump

The fact of the matter is he is a consummate narcissist and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk. … He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it. … He’s like a 9-year-old, a defiant 9-year-old kid, who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table defying his parents to stop him from doing it.

William Barr, who together with a few other former high officials in Trump’s administration have ruled out voting for him in 2024:

Nikki Haley
Mike Pence
Mike Pompeo
John Bolton
William Barr
Mick Mulvaney
Betsy DeVos
Dan Coats
Rex Tillerson
Alex Azar
Elaine Chao
John Kelly
Mark Esper
James Mattis
H.R. McMaster
Richard Spencer
Mark Milley

The ubiquitous machine

The body is mine and the soul is mine’
says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them
and there is not peace. I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.”

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

Sleazy but legal?

Remember this?

I had mixed, but mostly negative, feelings about it at the time. (The positive feelings boiled down to “anyone who doesn’t know you can’t vote by text message is someone I’d prefer not vote anyway.”)

But UCLA libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh opposes the criminal prosecution of the guy who perpetrated this hoax.

Poetry needs to vibrate the air

Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry. Without the sound, the reader looks at the lines as he looks at prose, seeking a meaning. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.

Basil Bunting, “The Poet’s Point of View” via Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone

The attention economy rewards shamelessness

In subsequent obscure journal articles, Mr. Goldhaber warned of the attention economy’s destabilizing effects, including how it has disproportionate benefits for the most shameless among us. “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age – The New York Times

The perfect candidate for the attention economy

Former President Donald Trump in a post on Truth Social:

“A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL ‘ROGUE COP’ OR ‘BAD APPLE.’ SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’ ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!”

TMD

“People do these elaborate takes about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and then he just comes out and says the president should be allowed to do infinite crimes,” Matt Yglesias marveled.

Nick Catoggio

Your government scamming you

When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.

For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car.

Until recently, this subsidy was a Washington secret. Carmakers and regulators liked it that way. Regulators could announce what sounded like stringent targets, and carmakers would nod along, knowing they could comply by making electric cars with arbitrarily boosted compliance values. Consumers would unknowingly foot the bill.

The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”

Carmakers have panicked and asked the Biden administration to delay any return to legal or engineering reality. That is understandable. Without the multiplier, the Transportation Department’s proposed rules are completely unattainable. But workable rules don’t require government-created cheat codes. Carmakers should confront that problem head on.

Michael Buschbacher and James Conde, The Electric-Vehicle Cheating Scandal – WSJ

Saturday, 12/9/23

I hope I’ll have enough voice to sing this evening’s Lafayette Chamber Singers concert, Pastyme With Good Companye. I’ve been fighting a cold since Tuesday.

Culture

Pizzagate is nothing new

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.

Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great

The inquisitive spirit

I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.

…

If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.

Agnes Callard. These are but a few snippets from a rich article defending the humanities, though the author cannot tell you the “value” of them.

Seeing obscurely

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears.

Maria Popova, introducing a review of In the Dark

The Apostle Paul said substantially the same thing, of course.

Science and intuition

Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order—the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality—has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word ‘intellectuality’ the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the ‘rationalist’ error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

Terror Profiteers

We’re had war profiteers for a very long time. Now we have terrorism profiteers:

Money from terror: Is it possible that Hamas terrorists made a profit on the October 7 massacre? It is. On Monday, two law professors, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of NYU and Joshua Mitts of Columbia, released the draft of a paper that makes the case. There was “a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company EFT [exchange traded fund] days before the October 7 Hamas attack. . . . Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv,” they write. Translation? There were people who, knowing the attack was coming, bet that the stocks of Israeli companies would fall. (H/T Joe Nocera for this guest item.)

Nellie Bowles

Politics

Apocalypse

In The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 special issue, 24 writers imagine what a second Trump term would look like.

After noticing that the top X articles on the Atlantic webpage Monday were about how horrible a second Trump term would be, I noted they were all from a January/February 2024 “special issue, and that the block-quote was the banner at the top of the page.

How do we deal with Trump? Indictments boost him. An Atlantic special issue full of warnings (probably ranging from sober to highly speculative) may add as much support as it peels off. Yet how dare we remain mute?

I said when Trump won in 2016 that it marked a major political realignment. I think I underestimated it.

The extent of support for Donald Trump strikes me as an apocalypse:

“Apocalypse” has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.

(Wikipedia) You could also say “unveiling.” That’s why I say that support for him is an apocalypse, not (just) that a second term would be a catastrophe.

What that apocalypse reveals, I’m starting to think, is that roughly half of Americans are finished with liberal democracy and want a populist strong man. And I suspect that half would say, in essence, “Why shouldn’t we be finished with it? That procedural fetish has not done well for me and mine.”

It might be prudent to “shut up and keep your head down,” but that’s never been advice I was inclined to take.

Reform the Insurrection Act!

The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.

…

When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.

Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford.

David French

Novelty Cons

George Santos was, for now at least, the ultimate Novelty Con:

I’m a college-educated white woman/black man/gay man/Latina/[some combination of the previous] under 40, and I am ready to repeat today’s GOP talking points!” That is the entire value proposition, but it works.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson continues:

Republicans have long been starved for novelty. From its founding in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 until 2016, the Republican Party was fundamentally the same thing the whole time: the party of heartland businessmen’s conservatism. …

There is a kind of devolutionary force at work among the Novelty Cons. Ann Coulter may play a crazy person on television, but she is smart and did real work as a real lawyer before she started doing … whatever it is she does now. Ben Carson is a brain surgeon. Michael Steele didn’t just wander in off the street and get made head of the Republican National Committee.

George Santos, on the other hand, is pretty much a guy who wandered in off the street into the House of Representatives, saying, “Let’s put on a show!” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon kook who wandered in off Facebook. Lauren Boebert is a general-purpose incompetent who wandered in after accidentally poisoning people with bad pork sliders at a county fair in Colorado. Matt Gaetz’s grandfather died of a heart attack at the North Dakota GOP convention, being at that time a minor public official and, apparently, a clairvoyant. This gang represents what you might call the immaculate grift: grift liberated from the burden of trying to carry forward a real political program or philosophy, grift for grift’s sake, ars (of a sort) gratia pecuniae. Putting these people into Congress is like mashing up Carmina Burana with the Ghostbusters theme—yeah, you can do that, there’s no law against it as far as I know, but … why_?_

Santos was—is?—whatever anybody needed him to be, the ultimate Novelty Con: Gay! Jewish! (or “Jew-ish.”) Latino! Whatever! He is the epitome of what the Republican Party stands for (“stands for”) in 2023: the willingness to say anything, however transparently dishonest, absurd, or self-abasing, in the hope of winning an election. He mustered some half-formed talk-radio grunts about inflation and crime and the like, but Santos was a pretty straightforward product: a gay Latino willing to put an “R” next to his name, the political version of whatever the opposite of a beard is. That Rep. Santos finally embarrassed the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert enough to get him expelled from the House is his only actual achievement in life.

I can’t say I’m proud of the GOP, but that enough Republicans joined Democrats to expel Santos makes me despise it a hair less.

Bespoke realities

There is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, someone who lives in the real world but also has questions about the moon landing, and on the other, a person who believes the Covid vaccine is responsible for a vast number of American deaths and Jan. 6 was an inside job and the American elite is trying to replace the electorate with new immigrant voters and the 2020 election was rigged and Donald Trump is God’s divine choice to save America.

Such individuals don’t simply believe in a conspiracy theory, or theories. They live in a “bespoke reality.” That brilliant term comes from my friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and it refers to the effects of what DiResta calls a “Cambrian explosion of bubble realities,” communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”

…

Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth. The terms “voluntarily” and “cooperatively” are key. We don’t live in North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China. We’re drunk on freedom by comparison. We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.

David French

Progressives

The Westboro Baptist Church of the left

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to scream at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral this week. They also showed up to scream during New York’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, which is up there alongside blocking highways at rush hour when it comes to winning over normal people. As the writer Josh Kraushaar put it: these guys are becoming the Westboro Baptist Church of the left.

Nellie Bowles

Ivy League besliming itself

In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”

…

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country.

Andrew Sullivan.

Jordan Peterson made the same point, in a different context, that Sullivan makes in the penultimate paragraph: “It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.” Oppressed are higher status than oppressors; Jews are definitionally oppressors because they are coded “white.”

This is called “progressive.” I don’t care to protect the reputation of progressivism, so I’m not going to concern-troll on its behalf. Fly your freaky flags, progressive America! Let your offensiveness be stand in stark relief to sanity!

It’s times like this when I understand (not to say “agree with”) the rightwing insistence that every presidential election is existential, and that the Ds are far worse than the Rs.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

Saturday, 12/2/23

A comment about my less-frequent blogging.

I’ve resumed, for several months now, use of my (digital) Journal and Common Place Book to collect many of the items I find amusing or that confirm my biases. A relative few of them I also still blog, along with items I judge are of more general interest than what gets logged only privately. That’s why I’m posting less total volume of material.

As this blog’s free for the taking, I don’t apologize, but wanted to explain.

Politics

The people

Character is destiny

Trump will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the “quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the beginning of all this, character is destiny.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Chuck Schumer’s Sister Souljah moment

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish official, gave a roughly 40-minute speech on the Senate floor Wednesday condemning the antisemitism that has exploded across the United States following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, calling it “a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.” The address, aimed largely at those on the political left, called out progressives who celebrated Hamas’ brutal attack and repeatedly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. “Many Jewish Americans fear what the future may bring, based on the repeated lessons of history,” he said. Meanwhile, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to appear before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5 to give testimony regarding antisemitism at their respective institutions.

TMD

The parties

Tone-deaf lefties

Voters want to hear how problems can be solved—not told they’re doomed unless obviously impractical steps are taken. And it doesn’t help that the Left’s version of the steps that must be taken includes a raft of unrelated social programs that would be nice to have but don’t do anything about climate change (see, for instance, the Green New Deal proposed in Congress). Nor does it help that obviously necessary components of a clean energy program like nuclear power are ruled out because, well, people on the Left don’t like nuclear power.

Ruy Teixeira, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

The dynamics of Left and Right

[W]e’re just really confused how people are not acknowledging that the democrats are just as in bed with corporate and pharmaceutical interests as republicans … I don’t know enough about psychology to say for sure why this has happened. Why when finally, finally, the Republicans are saying, “Woah, looks like the police are sometimes racist. We do need police reform!” the left had to then go, “Reform? Who said anything about reform? We need to defund the police!”… The truth is that neither party represents working class Americans. And these supposed “socialists” – what are they running on? Free college and banning fracking. It’s maddening.

Highly Qualified: What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?.

This is from some Readwise highlights. I have no memory of who linked to the original enticingly enough to get me there. I swear I’m not a regular at The Dandy, which appears to be for upstate New York elitist pot-heads.

Epigraph or epitaph?

When the history of this era is written, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about” should be its epigraph.

Nick Cattogio, quoting equivocally Anti-Trump Chris Sununu.

How reticent Republicans will come around to Trump

One of the shining lessons of the past eight years is that however low your expectations might be for Republican voters, they’re not low enough. Most of those on the right who should know better but have stuck it out this far will get to “yes” on Trump 2.0, I suspect. Some might do so after determined efforts at self-persuasion, but most will back Trump without much strain.

There are various rationalizations to which they’ll turn to resolve the tension between their nagging fear that Trump is a poisonous threat to America’s civic heritage and their partisan duty to believe that government by the far right is preferable to government by the far left—and that every Democrat is supposedly a member, or a puppet, of the far left. Those rationalizations are a strange brew of magical thinking and hard-nosed “binary choice” partisan logic.

…

[A] Republican-controlled Congress would either tolerate or actively enable Trump’s power grabs in a second term, the same way that congressional Republicans tolerated or actively enabled his aggressive deficit spending during his first term. We are very late in the game for anyone to still pretend that the GOP cares about restraining the federal government whenever they’re in charge of it, but that’s the sort of silliness in which one must indulge to imagine reelecting Trump as some sort of civic good.

Nick Cattogio

Mis-judging what “real Americans” want

Follow me for what is going to long like a sudden left turn: Do you know why the Republicans’ bad reputation on racial questions is a problem for the GOP politically? It isn’t because it costs them among black voters—it is because it costs them among white voters, of whom there are a whole lot more, many of whom do not wish to associate themselves with a party that is known (not without reason) for harboring politicians and activists with ugly and atavistic racial attitudes. These same voters—many of whom would be more or less on board with traditional Republican economic policies—are put off by other characteristics of the GOP coalition: its anti-intellectualism, its rural orientation, etc. That isn’t to say that everybody in the Republican Party is a rube on a turnip truck—but if you see a bunch of rubes piled into a turnip truck, you can bet that the turnip truck is going to have a “Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President!” bumper sticker on it. It isn’t going to say “Biden-Harris 2024.”

The Democrats have wisely offered themselves up as the natural political home of those upwardly mobile urban-suburban professionals the Republican Party doesn’t want. The Martin Center’s main man George Leef can sneer at the elite universities three times a week in the pages of National Review, but there is a great many young Americans who very much would like to attend one of those universities, and a great many middle-aged Americans who would like their children to attend such a school and who care a great deal about who gets in and why. But, even among people for whom Harvard’s admissions standards are not an immediate and urgent issue, the question remains: Do you want to associate yourself with the Ivy League crowd and the upwardly mobile strivers, or with the sneerers and scoffers who (though college-educated themselves, of course!) want you to believe that there’s a bright future in bumpkinism?

…

Republicans have spent the past 15 years or so micturating from a great height upon the aspirations of people who might want (for themselves or for their children) an Ivy League education, a high-paying job in technology or finance, a nice home in Silicon Valley or New York City or another big metropolitan area—in cities and suburbs that may not comport exactly with their politics on the whole but which offer (to everyone who is not a political monomaniac) many other important benefits, from economic opportunity to cultural interests to superior health care facilities. “Real Americans,” Republicans insist, do not aspire to such things—all Real Americans want to be farmers in Muleshoe, Texas, and diesel mechanics in Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Kevin D. Williamson

(Williamson suggests that the Democrats, too, are following policies apt to alienate strivers, but the Republican transmogrification is easier to caricature.)

So glad he solved that

How about it doesn’t matter whether progressives are liberals? We must move beyond the old labels. We are separated by rationalists and irrationalists.

What was once liberal is simply (as it mostly always has been) common sense, common decency, and management of inevitable change for the benefit of the general welfare and liberty and justice for all. Basically, what any reasonable and broad view of society would see as doing the right thing.

Almost anyone’s reading of social and political history would agree that we live in a better, more decent and fair nation because of the right things that rationalists did: abolish slavery, rein in the robber barons, establish labor laws, and approve women’s suffrage, civil rights, voting rights, Social Security and Medicare. The right things to do, which the irrationalists opposed.

In this new century social attitudes have changed, geopolitical power has changed, technology has exploded, the climate has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need and desire to do the right and decent thing. And there is only one side that continues that fight.

When we finally pull our heads above the surface of the water we’re swimming in, we might see that there is no longer a divide of right and left, red and blue, liberal and conservative; it’s one simply of right and wrong. Rationality vs. irrationality.

Mansplaining Texan’s letter to the New York Times

I read this as “Let’s do away with an imperfectly nuanced political spectrum in favor of this useless but self-flattering binary.”

Foreign follies

“Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

Culture

A brutalizing and stupid idea

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

A Matter of Principle

Less than a decade ago, I had high regard for “conservative” Hillsdale College. Its hiring of Michael (“Flight 93 Election”) Anton, who is at it again, together with the populist, rabble-rousing tone of its mailings, have brought that high regard to an bitter end.

Nevertheless, I’m in Hillsdale’s corner on this pernicious lawsuit. Hillsdale accepts no federal aid, but left activists, acting in the name of two co-eds who allegedly were acquaintance-raped by two Hillsdale men, are trying to impose Title IX processes on Hillsdale or else strip it of tax exemption.

SCOTUS sowed bad seed when it let the IRS strip Bob Jones University of tax exemption because of its odious policies on race. This is going to be a battlefront in the Left/Right wars for some time to come (and I have little doubt that the Right will try a tit-for-tat attack on some leftish nonprofits).

EA

Defined in these broad terms, effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?

…

This is why EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals. (This would seem to require a belief that prey animals dying of disease and starvation is superior to dying from predation, but ah well.) … [T]hose examples are essential because they demonstrate the problem with hitching a moral program to a social and intellectual culture that will inevitably reward the more extreme expressions of that culture. It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.

Freddie deBoer, The Effective Altruism Shell Game

Fox Porn

From my point of view, the case against Fox News isn’t that it is dangerous or that Tucker Carlson’s work is likely to incite anybody to violence. (Maybe it will, but I doubt it. This country may generate a few school-shooters every year, but I don’t think it has the energy for a sustained intifada.) The case against Fox News is that it is tedious, repetitive, and lurid. Aesthetically and emotionally, it more often resembles pornography than it does, say, the commentary of Paul Harvey.

Kevin D. Williamson (paywall)

They voted their lying eyes

We disagreed—and still do—with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration.

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they—the public—had not been adequately consulted.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus, The Death of the Old Europe—and the Rise of the Right

The horseshoe theory of politics

[Marx and Engels] write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical …

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.)

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter.

Alan Jacobs, Conceptual Marxism

The expiration of small-c conservatism

London has become its own country in a way, leaving the hinterlands further behind, its elites still gnashing their teeth about Boris and Brexit, while picking at their octopus starters. The prime minister is Hindu, the mayor of London is Muslim, and the first minister of Scotland is Muslim. The abandoned husks of churches contrast with the bustle of new mosques. This is a Britain unlike anything before.

And some of it clearly works: close your eyes and listen to young non-white Brits on the buses or trains, and all the accents and slang are instantly recognizable from my youth. The humor is still rich. Civility is fraying but still there. Crime is nowhere near American levels. The new Elizabeth underground line is marvelous. A city with the cultural cohesion of the Heathrow departure lounge somehow hangs together. The Brits are still a nation of high-functioning alcoholics and retain their strange, hysterical aversion to cannabis. It’s a miracle of multicultural harmony, but you can feel its internal tensions rising.

…

And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

Andrew Sullivan

Another new category for this blog

I once fancied that racism in the classic “dark people are inferior to light people” sense had largely vanished from the U.S. I conceded that racial stereotypes remained, but thought that even those fled in the face of a nicely-dressed darker person who spoke standard English — someone like, say, Thomas Sowell, Condoleeza Rice, or Barack Obama.

Birtherism and other bizarre attacks on said Obama persuaded me that I had been mistaken. People weren’t calling him [racial epithet omitted], but something dark and atavistic was afoot. Maybe I need to get out more.

I was less naïve about antisemitism, but it has so shamelessly reared its ugly head since October 7 that I’ve added it as a “category,” appearing today for the first time as such (earlier blogs no doubt had it as a “tag”).

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

Alexander Riley

Black Friday

Thanksgiving thoughts

Let’s look at the rest of the world briefly, which is all it requires: China? Communists. The Middle East? We’re getting off oil sooner rather than later, and there will come a day when a Saudi prince, without his precious oil allowance, suddenly has to work a real job, and it will be a disaster. Europe? A lovely museum to a special culture that decided it was done, stopped procreating and stopped inventing, and now has to be liquidated for sensitivity purposes (I’m hearing that the English language is Islamophobic colonialism). That leaves us with America. The US of A. Land of the free. Land of invention. Bastion of the world’s brightest minds and hardest workers. Despite the nuts wandering around—and yes, there are many—we’re still the best party on earth. I’m so thankful to have had the profound luck of being born here. I’m grateful for America.

Nellie Bowles

My standard line when somebody tries to bait me into a political debate is, “I’m a professional; I only do this when I’m getting paid.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson goes on to get a lot deeper than “how I avoid politics at the Thanksgiving table” — a perennial topic that’s losing its fragrance. Here’s some of that deeper:

Thanksgiving is, among other things, a reminder of the pleasures of private life, which are almost always superior to their public and commercial competitors. Dinner at home with family and friends is better than dinner at the best restaurant in New York City or London. Sleeping in your own bed is better than a suite at the Ritz-Carlton …

Especially at this time of year, a fire and a book and children and a dog in one’s own home are nonpareil pleasures. I am not saying everybody should move into a cabin in the woods: There is a reason the very wealthy use their money to expand the scope of their private lives: private jets, private clubs, or, if you’ve really got piles of it, private islands. But the point isn’t to have a gold-plated toilet on your personal 747—the point is to have things just the way you like them.

I read a bizarre story a few months ago about private-jet owners who make a little money back on their travel by renting their planes out between flights—for substantial amounts of money—to would-be social-media influencers who simply want to be photographed inside them, pretending to be flying. … I do not get the demand side of that market.

The guy who posts Instagram pictures of himself on a private jet doesn’t know what a private jet is for, because he doesn’t know what private life is for—what he wants is to be envied. Fake wealth isn’t going to solve his problem–but neither is real wealth. His orientation is fundamentally exterior and public, dominated by the desire to be seen and by the need to see himself through the eyes of others, as though he would cease to exist if he ceased being looked at. As David Foster Wallace pointed out in a memorable passage in Infinite Jest, the ache that envy makes us feel turns out not to have a reciprocal: There isn’t actually any pleasure or joy in being envied. The man who spends his time and energy manufacturing advertisements for his own (supposed) happiness is not made larger by the attention of others but instead is made smaller by his desperate scrambling after it.

There is a difference between living one’s life and performing it. Performing life for some unseen audience on social media is perverse. Every time I hear someone use the term “personal brand,” I cringe a little. That is the worst kind of faux-sophistication, and it speaks to a real deficiency in the interior life.

Nowhere in particular

This one’s evergreen. I’ve almost certainly blogged it before:

I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.” (Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head)”I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head (emphasis added).

Postliberalism

Today’s post-liberal conservatives appear to think they’re distinguished by the belief that virtue matters. They behave as if their core disagreement with fusionists is about whether human beings have moral obligations that go beyond leaving others alone to do as they please. This could hardly be more wrong. Anyone who holds to the Judeo-Christian tradition—as fusionists by definition do—accepts that we have manifold duties to one another. The disagreement is about whether it’s the state’s job to enforce those moral obligations.

(Stephanie Slade, Is There a Future for Fusionism?

Lacunae

Reading Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. 📚

I reached my 75th birthday recently, having never read one of her novels. I’m thinking that was a terrible mistake.

I’ll probably try Annie Dillard next, despite learning to my shock that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek isn’t a novel. I’ve got something in me that responds to certain kinds of women writers.

Political-ish

Hard-core pornography and far-right politics

Years and years ago, preachers inveighed against “hard-core pornography.” (Today, few if any do because they don’t want to drive away all the young men.) I knew then that there was some big-time hyperbole going on when Playboy fell in the “hard-core” category. It contributed to my growing sense that a lot of preachers really didn’t have anything edifying to say.

Today, mainstream media similarly fling around “far right.” I know they’re engaging in hyperbole some of the time they do that (e.g., Viktor Orban — there, I’ve outed myself!), and in so doing they debase themselves and make the discerning reader skeptical of all they say. (They also prove that conservatives don’t own all the echo chambers.)

All that to ask: Is Geert Wilders really far-right, or does he just offend progressive media biases? Is he within or outside the Overton Window? Is “far right” generally within or without? I do not know, but I know not to trust the Economist’s take.

Book-banning

Wait, who banned those books? A lot of celebrities and politicians like doing activism to fight against “book banning,” but they often accidentally point to books that were banned by their own team. This week: pop star Pink. She claims that Florida banned To Kill a Mockingbird. . . but. . . actually, To Kill a Mockingbird is required reading in Florida schools. It was recently banned—by a district in Washington State. Those teachers in Washington State said this: “ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird centers on whiteness,’ ” and “ ‘it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.’ ”

A good rule of thumb for Pink and other celebrities: anything written about race by a white person? That’s going to be banned in the states you live in. Anything written about sex by a person who enjoyed sex a little too much or has brightly dyed hair? That’s gonna be banned in your red states. Easy peasy.

Nellie Bowles

Undue process, due unprocess, whatever.

I suppose that when Ayaan Hirsi Ali sought asylum from Sudan, she had even worse than this in mind: Washington Court Refuses to Enforce Saudi Child Custody Decree.

We do well to remember the benefits even of post-Christendom (at least until the fumes from the empty bottle dissipate and we descend further).

In other words, he won’t run … right?

Retiring Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Wednesday that he is “absolutely” considering running for president in 2024 and will travel the country in the coming months to see if there is a desire for a moderate option in the presidential contest. “I’m totally, absolutely scared to death that Donald Trump would become president again,” Manchin told NBC News. Manchin also addressed concerns that he could siphon votes away from President Joe Biden. “I’ve never been a spoiler in my life of anything,” he said, “and I would never be a spoiler now.”

TMD

Hard to believe he wouldn’t be a spoiler.

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

Alexander Riley

Monday, 9/25/23

Culture generally

Living with Autism

Lutz, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has previously written a book about her experiences raising a son (now an adult) with severe autism, goes on to lay out a fascinating history of this concept in the first half of Chasing the Intact Mind. She focuses heavily on memoirs written by parents of children with autism, showing how at every stage in the modern history of our understanding of this condition, such parents have pined for — and in some cases gone to herculean and frequently pseudoscientific lengths to free — the “intact mind” supposedly lurking behind their severely disabled child’s troubled exterior. It’s often quite difficult for these parents to accept that their experiences raising kids with severe autism, which can involve the everyday management of violent tantrums, obsessively repetitive behavior, and problems with toileting and basic communication, reflect not a temporary challenge that will be overcome, with a “normal” kid waiting at the other end of a journey, but rather simply who their child is and will always be. But sometimes, unfortunately, that’s the case.

Jesse Singal.

I selected this quote because it rings so true — even in the case fairly mild “on the spectrum” children. Of course, it doesn’t help if qualified doctors don’t give the blunt word “your child suffers Asperger’s Syndrome” (as was the current terminology for the child I”m thinking of). If doctors shilly-shally around with “we don’t know what’s wrong,” it’s understandable that parents would seek someone — heck, anyone — who says he does know.

Compelling governmental interests

[Escondido Union School District] contends that the government purpose of protecting gender diverse students from (an undefined) harm is a compelling governmental interest and the policy of non-disclosure to parents is narrowly tailored…. This argument is unconvincing. First, both the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court have found overly broad formulations of compelling government interests unavailing…. Second, keeping parents uninformed and unaware of significant events that beg for medical and psychological experts to evaluate a child, like hiding a gym student’s soccer concussion, is precisely the type of inaction that is likely to cause greater harm and is not narrowly tailored. ….

Mirabelli v. Olson (Southern District California, Sept. 14, 2023), via Religion Clause blog, Teachers Get Religious Exemption from School Policy Barring Disclosure to Parents of Gender Identity Changes

Nellie on the 15th

→ Working really hard to spin this: The New York Times is working very hard to somehow spin the migrant situation in New York and Chicago into being a problem Republicans caused. It’s hard. Biden is president and in charge of the border. These cities are all run by Democrats. But. . . there must be a way that Republicans created this. We got it! They hoped it into existence:

I hope you’re happy, GOP, with all the families sleeping in gyms in Staten Island, just like you planned.

…

In Toronto public schools, to make it easier to ensure the books are equitable, everything written in 2008 or earlier has been removed from shelves. For real. It’s just too risky to have old books that might have old ideas written by the wrong type of author. And so, to make the so-called book “weeding” process easier, we’re not even looking past 2008. Goodbye to The Very Hungry Caterpillar and goodbye to The Diary of Anne Frank (I’m sure there are others, but really, are there?). The world began in 2009. We have no knowledge of what came before that year. Why are you asking about it? Why do you need to read a book from before then? Is it your homophobia? Is it that you hate Latinos? I’m just taking notes because it’s interesting that you’re so interested.

…

… Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a detransitioner who had a double mastectomy at 16 is suing the hospital. Literally, all these clinics need to do is wait until the kid turns 18.

Nellie Bowles

Miscellany

“The term ‘non-binary’ can be translated to Spanish as ‘no binario’ or ‘no binaria’ depending on the gender of the person,” – ChatGPT.
“Yale University has more employees than it does students. In fact, the school has 2.44 administrators for every faculty member, and one administrator for every four students. That’s the same ratio the government recommends for childcare of infants under twelve months,” – Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.
“I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story — that [Covid] came from a wet market where wild animals were sold — at face value. If I am honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview … [Steve Bannon and others’] over-the-top conspiracies fed our over credulity; their ‘question everything’ led many of us to not questioning enough,” – Naomi Klein.

Via Andrew Sullivan

What humanity as a whole needs

Although they differed on many matters, Dostoevsky, Danilevsky, and Leontyev did ultimately agree on one thing: the interests of humanity as a whole demanded that Russia not copy the West, but rather defend its own distinctive culture.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

In case you were wondering,

The claim that peaceful January 6 protesters have been held without bail, which has become widespread in some quarters of the right, is false.

Fact Checking Vivek Ramaswamy’s Claims About January 6 Defendants.

(If you can get the September 17 Doonesbury, do.)

Speaking of which, half my kingdom to anyone who can non-violently wipe that cheesy grin off Vivek Ramaswamy’s face.

Pop starlets

Terry Mattingly tells of interviewing Allison Krause early in her career and asking why she was sticking with bluegrass and with her band Union Station (I believe she’s been offered a very big pop music deal). Her answer, basically, was “If I go to pop, will anybody be listening when I’m 60?”

A related question for young pop starlets is “Will anyone listen if I don’t show a lot of skin?” For very few (I’m looking at you, Taylor Swift) is the answer “yes.”

(And that’s not a “clean bill of health” for Swift. I don’t know her oeuvre well enough to give it more than one tepid thumb-up.)

Self-refuting

[I]f you want to know how NOT to start a letter defending yourself from accusations of antisemitism, you can use this letter as a model. After noting that the festival has been harshly criticized by “the Jewish Federation and the ADL,” the organizers have this to say:

unlike our detractors, we do not operate in the shadows nor among elite decision makers and funders. Rather, we value transparency and public access, accountability, and scrutiny. We are also acutely aware of the power disparity between these highly funded, connected and organized Zionist organizations versus our small cultural institution run by volunteers and student organizations, most of them Penn students.

Talk about self-owns… The organizers are so clueless about antisemitism that they engage in classic anti-Jewish tropes while defending themselves from charges of antisemitism. Which kinda undermines anything else they have said or will say in their defense.

David Bernstein, Despite What Those Shadowy, Elite, Rich Jews Say, We’re Not Antisemites, quoting Spokespersons for the “Palestine Writes Literary Festival” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Caution

A people that extends its empire too far from its base commits the sin of Onan and spills its seed upon the ground.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Slowing Down

Liturgy of the Mall

What the liturgy of the mall trains us to desire as the good life and “the American way” requires such massive consumption of natural resources and cheap (exploitive) labor that it is impossible for this way of life to be universalized.

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Necessity is the mother

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

Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul

Maybe lack of principles isn’t all bad …

Even if I don’t intend to keep the same pace as people here, I often just have to. In India, there’s none of that kind of stuff. The difference is as great as that between getting on a slow local train and getting on the bullet train.” When I ask her what she thinks the reason is, she says, “Well, the effect of the heat is one thing: India is hot. But don’t you think the principles they have are different? The focus of thinking in Japan is economics, or it has become that way recently. Even politics is more like a form of economics than an attempt to realize an ideal society. Politicians don’t have any principles in Japan.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Sexual Revolution

How do you measure success?

The other day, the Free Press sponsored a public debate on the question of has the Sexual Revolution failed? Rob Henderson writes:

…

The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom.

The answer to the debate description (“The sexual revolution promised liberation. Fifty years on, we ask: has it delivered?”) is obviously yes.

But the reason why a debate makes sense is because many people conflate liberation (freedom) with happiness.

The revolution has unquestionably increased freedom. But it also made people less happy. Many people, though, anticipated that greater freedom would necessarily bring greater happiness.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

We can’t have everything good all at once. We can have some good things, but we can’t have all good things at the same time.

…

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

(via Rod Dreher)

I disagree that “there’s no going back.” I have no quick fix or straight path back, but I suspect we will somehow go back — some day. But there are going to be a lot of children irreparably damaged meanwhile, because the sexual revolution is another of those luxury beliefs that the elites can more-or-less survive but which devastates millions when it trickles down.

Dreher, musing on the topic agrees with Henderson: “We’re going to have to ride this thing out till the collapse.” I’m not sure that’s all that different from what I suspect. I just deny that “the collapse” is the end of the world; it may be a pivot-point. Apropos of this theme, which I’ve sounded several times recently, see Nathaniel Peters, Living Well at the End of a World.

Children’s happiness, adult freedom

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

Rod Dreher, Sex, Freedom, Happiness

Poco Politics

Denizens of Delusionland

[W]hile 91 percent of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better off if they have married parents,” only 30 percent of college-educated liberals agree, according to a report to be released next week by the Institute for Family Studies.

…

One stunning and depressing gauge of racial inequity in the United States: The study found that 62 percent of white children live in low-poverty areas with fathers present in most homes, while only 4 percent of Black children do.

Nicholas Kristof. Every once in a while, it’s nice to see conservatives so clearly a part of the “reality-based community” with liberals off in Delusionland.

Gender vs. Sex

While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Sheluyang Peng, Immigration is religion’s only hope.

Occasionally, something like this pops up and makes me realize why some voters consider “Republican” Donald Trump the lesser evil compared to any Democrat.

Why such a hack?

Everyone knows that Kamala Harris is, as one writer put it, a “hack with terrible political skills.” Peggy Noonan, has what seems like a plausible suggestion of how someone who has ascended so high could remain such a political klutz:

She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.

Note: Gavin Newsom will be just as bad if elevated to national office.

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

David French

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.

Political, but not partisan

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

Gobsmacked?

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

The emigration of the Left

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

The prime directive of any bureaucracy

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

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

Matthew B. Crawford, The illegitimacy of the male

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

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

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

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

In Vibetown, it always made sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new education rhetoric

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

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

Nellie Bowles

How and in what sense has the Right become authoritarian?

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

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

That is how the right gets to nascent authoritarianism ….

Damon Linker

What some American conservatives see in Putin

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

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

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

The real problem with corporate tax cuts

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

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

J.D. Vance via American Compass

In 20 seconds or less: why Ramaswamy?

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

Ross Douthat’s hypothetical elevator pitch for Vivek Ramaswamy

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

R.R. Reno

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

Wednesday, 1/18/23

“Science”

Follow the scien(tists’ secret agendas)

Few areas of medicine have become as politically heated, and in need of cool-headed research, as treatment of transgender children. Neither side seems to be engaging in good faith. Some Democrats have misrepresented the medical consensus on how best to help children with gender-related distress, presenting this as a closed matter when there is no global scientific consensus. The cherry-picking of evidence by medical bodies such as the American Academy of Paediatrics helps explain why Republicans have become twice as likely as Democrats to believe scientists have agendas beyond the pursuit of scientific fact.

The Economist, 1/14/123

The Über-Agenda

More drugs and surgery for kids: The American Academy of Pediatrics this week came out with new recommendations: Obese children should be given weight loss drugs and surgery at ages as young as 12 and 13, respectively. Now, that is probably the right thing to do for severely obese children. But also: The new recommendations argue that “obesity is a chronic disease.” Obesity, in the new mindset, can never be about choices. It is not a lifestyle problem.

The message is: body positivity and junk food are a-ok (can’t be shaming anyone!) until the American medical establishment can profit, and then it’s a sharp pivot to hardcore drugs and surgery. It’s cheap, government-subsidized corn products shoveled into school lunches, then a series of expensive drugs for chemically imbalanced adolescents. There is no middle ground.

One thing I noticed in the new pediatric guideline is they use the word overweight in a way I’d never seen. It goes: “youth with overweight and obesity.” As in: “This is the AAP’s first clinical practice guideline (CPG) outlining evidence-based evaluation and treatment of children and adolescents with overweight and obesity.” Obesity and “overweight” is a disease you catch.

Nellie Bowles

Has anyone devised and deployed an effective incentive for doctors to learn about, and prescribe, good nutrition — patient-tailored if necessary?

Legalia

Notably off-narraative

Some LGBetc students sued to circumvent or invalidate exemptions for certain religious schools from certain nondiscrimination rules:

To recap, a coalition of students sued the Biden Department of Education, seeking to roll back religious liberty and place a high price on the autonomy of religious organizations, the Biden administration defended religious liberty, and a Clinton-appointed judge dismissed the case, relying in part on unanimous Supreme Court precedent decided by both Republican and Democratic-appointed justices.

This is not exactly the culture war narrative you hear on cable news.

David French, trying to inject a little anti-inflammatory into the culture war narrative.

(H/T Get Religion, critiquing the pathetic coverage of the story by RNS).

Covenants not to compete

For the record, I viscerally and strongly support the Biden FTC’s move to abolish Covenants Not to Compete. I do so because I have seen their abuse over and over again.

My state, Indiana, always greets lawsuits over these covenants with ritual incantations that they are viewed with disfavor. Then it always upholds them, no matter how ludicrous and unreasonable.

What I most hate about the Indiana approach is the perversity of this reasoning:

Unless otherwise agreed, all employees are “at will.”
It’s sad that you uprooted your family and moved X miles for a job with an employer who didn’t mention covenants not to compete, but when your new employer thrust the covenant before you on your first day and said “sign,” it was supported by adequate consideration because employer didn’t fire you then and there.
Yes, the employer could still fire you without cause tomorrow. What is it about “at will” you don’t understand, dummy?

I suppose if you checked, you might find one or two covenants rejected by an Indiana appellate court, though I don’t recall one. So sue me.

And I suppose that the FTC probably lacks lawful power to abolish them. So sue it. I know someone will.

Politics

The difference between conservatives and Freedom Caucus

Some people have asked me, “How has the Trump era changed you?” For one thing, it has made me a lot more conservative — not in the Fox-and-talk sense, but in an older, Burkean one. Most of the radicalism in me has been snuffed out.

One of the GOP’s new congressmen, Madison Cawthorn, said, “I want a new generation of Americans to be radicals.”

Well, to hell with that.

Jay Nordlinger, Lies, Patriotism, and Consequences, January 11, 2021.

The populism that the press keeps styling as some sort of conservatism is still radical two year later, as shown by legislation that proposes wholesale to tear down systems and replace them with untried “conservative” alternatives. Florida Governor DeSantis is not exempt from this observation, as he loads up the Board of New College of Florida with populists like Christopher Rufo, who are in a hurry to demolish and rebuild.

One Simpson’s episode worth ten thousand words

As we approach the 30th anniversary of The Simpsons’ legendary Monorail episode, Alan Siegel caught up with Conan O’Brien—a former writer for the show—on what it was like to pitch what is now considered one of the most timeless bits in sitcom history. “[“Marge vs. the Monorail”] warned the world about charismatic men selling foolishly grandiose solutions to problems that don’t need fixing,” Siegel writes for The Ringer. “References to the episode will never cease making O’Brien happy. While browsing the Rose Bowl flea market, his friend once noticed a framed travel poster showcasing Homer and the monorail. ‘It says, “Glides as smoothly as a cloud,’’’ O’Brien says. ‘I was like, “You have to buy that for me.” It wasn’t even that much. That’s hanging in my house, and I kind of smile every time I see it.’ Still, the fact that ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ is seemingly brought up whenever a grifter dupes the public surprises O’Brien. After all, it was an idea that started very, very small.”

The Morning Dispatch

Gun control as culture war

[A]ttempts to ban ordinary weapons such as semiautomatic rifles and handguns are plainly unconstitutional, that they would be unlikely to do much to deter violent crime, and that they are at root intellectually dishonest: They are more genuinely a culture-war assault by progressive-leaning urbanites and suburbanites on gun owners as a demographic, one that is perceived (not entirely accurately) as being socially retrograde, white, male, rural, Southern, middle-aged—everything that communicates “Trump voter” to people living in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Kevin D. Williamson

Face the GOP Facts

[I]t’s long past time for well-meaning conservatives writing in good faith to face up to the facts: The GOP is not an economically populist party and shows no signs at all of becoming one. It’s a culturally populist party with a plutocratic economic agenda.

Damon Linker, The Right’s Economic Populism is Stillborn

Realistic Expectations

“The only reason for a Republican hopeful to put their own aspirations aside and back DeSantis in 2024 is because it would be good for the country for the GOP to finally rid itself of Trump,” Nick writes in Tuesday’s Boiling Frogs. “I doubt a single one will pass on the race for that reason.”

The Morning Dispatch

January 6

The Stanford historian David M. Kennedy has spent a career as an authority on American society and politics; winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote one of the most popular textbooks on American history and has delved into a number of controversies and political movements. But he has struggled to come up with any analogue from the past for what he describes as the “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “This is a unique moment,” he says, “where a degree of insanity and irrationality has infected a large enough sector of our body politic that we’re really sick. I think we are politically sick, and I use that word advisedly.”

Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna and Emily Cadei, The Education of Josh Hawley – POLITICO

Nonpartisan Gmail filters

The Federal Election Commission decided last week to dismiss a complaint brought by the Republican National Committee and other GOP campaign groups that alleged Gmail’s spam filter constituted “illegal, corporate in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign and Democrat[ic] candidates across the country.” Republicans cited a North Carolina State University study that found GOP campaign emails were sent to spam at a significantly higher rate than Democratic ones, but FEC officials found no evidence any disproportionate results were intentional and held that Google had “credibly supported its claim” that the spam filter exists for commercial purposes. As Sarah noted last year, Republican campaigns have a long history of overusing and sharing email lists, resulting in spam filters being triggered at a higher rate.

The Morning Dispatch

Quoted without concurrence

I doubtless suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, even after having watched with bemusement people with Bush or Obama derangements. By admitting this, I’m saying that I simply have never understood how Donald J. Trump could appeal to any upright adult human, let alone appeal as POTUS.

I know he does appeal to some such people, though, and is at least tolerable to many more. So I need periodically to let one of his defenders make the case:

When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like with the audio debate a few years ago “Do you hear ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’?,” what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests.

Kellyanne Conway, The Cases for and Against Trump

(Another thing I can’t understand is how vocal NeverTrumper George Conway and Kellyanne kept their marriage intact 2015-2020.)

Cited without any conviction that it really matters

Renato Mariatti makes the case that Biden’s retention of classified documents is nothing like Trump’s:

…

Based on what we know now, Biden’s sloppy retention of a smattering of classified documents looks more like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inadvertent retention of classified material on a private email server than former President Donald Trump’s stubborn refusal to return hundreds of classified documents to the DOJ despite repeated demands from federal officials.

Trump is under investigation for willful retention of classified records because he ignored direct requests from national archives officials, a grand jury subpoena and even a personal visit from DOJ’s top counterintelligence official. The FBI seized the documents pursuant to a search warrant only after they discovered that Trump’s attorneys lied to them and that documents had been moved inside Mar-a-Lago after their visit.

…

While the Biden investigation is at an early stage, and there may be key facts that are not yet public, Biden’s actions appear to have been sloppy and inadvertent rather than willful and obstructive. Most of the statutes that Trump is under investigation for violating wouldn’t apply to Biden’s conduct. The only statute that Hur would likely investigate is 18 U.S.C. 793(f)(1), which punishes the loss or removal of national defense information resulting from “gross negligence.”

Culture

Woke schoolmarms

[W]hy does wokeness … drive me crazy?

The beginning of an answer can be found in the fact that wokeness makes me feel like I’m attending Sunday school in a denomination and parish I never chose to join. I just turn on the radio or open the paper or scroll through Twitter — and the next thing I know, a finger-wagging do-gooder with institutional power behind him is delivering a sermon, showing me The Way, calling on me to repent, encouraging me to be born again in the moral light.

Damon Linker, Why does wokeness drive me crazy?

Too much of a good thing?

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

Walter M. Miller Jr. [A Canticle for Leibowitz]()

Faces and heels

Aaron Renn has a fascinating account of “heels” and “faces,” a dichotomy from the argot of professional wrestling that I’d not heard before, including this interesting take on the Trump phenomenon:

Playing the heel is not always a strategic failure. Some people can succeed in both using heel mode to benefit themselves, and having some strategic success as well.

The big example is Donald Trump. The party system, political finance structure, and media apparatus made it essentially impossible for any fundamental changes to or questioning of the system to gain traction. Trump, in a judo type move, was able to use the media’s desire for a conservative heel to draw immense media attention that catapulted him to the presidency. Most of the time, he was able to successfully parry media attacks using some variation of heel tactics.

Not only that, his candidacy and presidency shook up the system in a way that I don’t recall ever happening since the Reagan era. While ultimately it might be completely suppressed – every major institution in society, including the Republican Party establishment, is aligned with making that suppression happen – he certainly made an impact. And that would not have happened without using heel tactics.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump has not only spent decades in the media spotlight, he’s also in the pro wrestling hall of fame. He has a deep understanding of how these dynamics work and how to deploy them successfully.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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