Category: grievance mongering

Columbus Day (observed)

History Rhymes

As it turned out, Yeltsin probably did not need to conduct a political campaign in the usual sense. As the Party’s hostility became more evident, Yeltsin’s popularity rose. The public attitude was that anybody the Communist apparatchiks detested must be a hero. The campaign the Party waged against Yeltsin was not merely futile; it was Yeltsin’s strongest political asset.

Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

Hostage situations

Republicans can’t unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.

But Democrats can’t say that a human being with a penis is not a woman.

Both major parties are hostage to crazies.

Hearsay High Dudgeon

Of Ta-Nahesi Coates

“Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

Helen Andrews.

I have no personal opinion of Mr. Coates. One of my then-favorites, Rod Dreher, was in awe of him as a writer, but before I read anything of his (save possibly a magazine article or such), he turned dour (that much I knew) and pretty much dropped off my radar.

But Andrews’ description of the worst active racism he personally experienced reminds me of a pattern I’ll call “hearsay high dudgeon.”

One notices such things, first, in one’s adversaries. 30+ years ago, my fair city, followed by the sister city across the river and my fair county, decided that we desperately needed to add sexual orientation to our human relations codes. There was no precipitating hate crime. The precipitant was merely that a liberal city councilman’s son came out, and the ordinance amendment felt like a father’s homage to his son.

As I listened to the heated public comments, I waited for evidence that we had unjust discrimination in our collective hearts. In three sets of public comments (one in each of the three jurisdictions in question), I heard one first-hand complaint from a lesbian whose military career was somehow deflected (I do not remember the details) before the military began liberalizing on such matters under the Clinton administration. (Of course, our local ordinance wasn’t going to change how the United States military treated such matters.)

But then there was one other first-hand account of local adverse effects: a male college student’s two male roommates no longer wanted to live with him after they found his stash of gay porn. Arguably, the Ordinances would have made that actionable as “discrimination in housing.” But was that discrimination “unjust”? Do we really want government intruding on roommate preferences?

Yes, we do in my community. Or maybe the testimony was irrelevant because our representatives just know, without evidence, what homophobic blackguards their constituents are.

Only later did I begin noticing similar things said by my allies. Various Christians also live in hearsay high dudgeon, collecting and cherishing accounts of “persecution” against other Christians.

Isn’t it pretty debilitating to present yourself or your tribe as victims to gain sympathy?

* * * * * * *

I have a sequel to the preceding. Some readers might wonder why I opposed extending anti-discrimination measures to the attribute of sexual orientation. They might even be indignant that I did that.

In large part, it was because I don’t think all “discrimination” is invidious (or unjust, if you prefer). “Discrimination” can be the epithet version of “discernment,” a very good and important word.

Let me illustrate. Suppose you run a government institution for troubled adolescent girls. Suppose you need staff and are determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent girls.

Of course you have rules as safeguards against sexual predation, but rules can be broken.

Should you be discerning and recognize that hiring a man likely to be sexually attracted to some of his charges, in a position that allows unsupervised access to the objects of his desire, is a formula for disaster and scandal? Or should you follow your nondiscrimination ideology and hire him if he is otherwise the best candidate, perhaps giving yourself a pat on the back for open-mindedness?

Now flip that script. Suppose one runs a government institution for troubled adolescent boys. Suppose one needs staff and is determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old “out” gay man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent boys.

Same questions.

If you said you’d hire the gay man, consider the story of Greg Ledbetter (and Angela Kalscheur, too – she illustrates the first hypothetical). Greg Ledbetter was the recipient of the legislative homage, the son who came out to his father the City Councilman who started the gay-rights ordinance balls rolling.

Ledbetter was hired by a home for troubled boys after he was “out” to anyone in town who paid any attention. A few years later, two of those troubled boys came forward to say he preyed on them sexually. The local press declared editorially that they were put up to the accusations by fundamentalist homophobes and that the episode was an illustration of blackguard homophobia. Somehow, Ledbetter’s defense attorneys got a signed retraction from one of the boys and the charges went away.

But the accusations were true. Ledbetter had even videotaped the encounters, as Wisconsin police discovered when they investigated him for similar sexual predation up there more than a decade later.

He’s in custody for the rest of his years. His journalistic enablers are complicit in the abuse of dozens of boys — and they didn’t do Ledbetter any favors either.

I didn’t know at the time whether the 1990s accusations were true or false (I had spoken to the boys, but did not undertake to represent them legally) nor do I expect that the journalists would have known. What I expected from the journalists was something better than damnable conspiracy theories about fundamentalist Christians, a fundamentalist being anyone more conservative than the journalist. The journalistic reaction was tribal, not rational; gay is good, conservative Christian bad.

I did not think that a gay man inevitably would bugger boys in his charge if given the chance any more than a straight man would copulate willy-nilly with nubile girls. But I was good and damn sure, from personal experience of male adolescence and young adulthood (from which vantage point some adolescent girls remained alluring), that the chances were way too high for his hiring to have been defensible.

Saying “no” to his application would have been “discernment,” not “discrimination.” But the Ordinance we passed categorically forbids any “difference in treatment in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations” based on sex or sexual orientation (or other attributed). No discernment is allowed.

Democrat conspiracy kooks

The claims had a powerful effect on public opinion among Democrats, just as Trump’s ranting and raving is doing now among Republicans. In March 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that an astonishingly high 66 percent of Democrats believed that in 2016 Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president — a claim with no more evidence behind it than Trump’s current assertions about being deprived of victory by voter fraud.

Damon Linker at The Week

Victimhood

In all seriousness, I am offended by the “typical” public school turning Orgasms for All After You Buy Consumer Crap You Don’t Need into our tacit national religion. But I’m roughly as offended by “Christian” clergy and school officials deceptively indoctrinating kids in sectarian Christianity*.

Remember that, dear Christian, next time you’re tempted to paint us as uniquely victims of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist varies from place-to-place.

Empty pantsuit

The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

… Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.

…

Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.

Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on.

Andrew Sullivan, who thinks Harris is losing.

Miscellany

  • In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
  • At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)

Frank Bruni

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday Truth in Advertising

Not really politics

Res ipsa loquitur

It is satisfying to manifest oneself concretely in the world, through manual competence; it has been known to make a person quiet and easy. It seems to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself, to vindicate his worth. He can remain quiet and simply point: The building stands, the lights are on, the car now runs.

Matthew Crawford, What School Didn’t Teach Us: Your Place in the World

I tend to forget how strange was the childhood of the brilliant and quirky Matthew Crawford. Read the item to see what I mean.

Bon mots

  • In The Washington Post, Amanda Katz noted that Kennedy had terminated his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, “ending a dilemma for voters torn between their love of deportation camps and their love of measles.”
  • In The New Yorker, Helen Rosner sampled the classic fare at a nearly 90-year-old French restaurant in Manhattan that received a recent sprucing-up: “You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon.”

Via Frank Bruni

  • “I don’t know if Democrats fully realize how damaging the image of the possible first woman president being incapable of giving an interview alone without the presence of a man to help her is,” – Meghan McCain.
  • “It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” – Lila Rose, anti-abortion activist, on Trump’s latest pivot. (D’ya think?)

Via Andrew Sullivan

Politics generally

A Thrill for Nerds

Political highlight of 2024: The Democrats selecting a successor to feeble President Joe Biden without panic about needing to re-do the primary elections.

I wasn’t politically sophisticated when the parties decided to turn over the selection of their Presidential candidates to whoever deigned to show up at a primary election (run at government expense, with government’s thumb on the scales to maintain the present two parties), but I was alive and aware. Because I was a snot-nosed kid, I probably thought it was a great idea.

It wasn’t. It took the selection from pros who wanted to win the election and turned it over to “the base”, which eventually would want maximalist trolling of the other duopoly party. Therein is a major source of our notorious “polarization,” at least among the noisier members of the parties.

If I haven’t said it before, I’m in favor of “smoke-filled rooms” or whatever other technique the parties choose to select candidates at their own expense. I heard one where they suggested non-binding primaries — a way to create a presumptive nominee, but giving the party a opportunity to bail out if the people’s choice is an idiot or semi-comatose.

(This rant inspired by Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast with the fabulous Yuval Levin.)

One picture, many words

…

Two things about the image stood out. One is the preposterous idea that “America” is accurately represented by five populist edgelords, all of whom live in close proximity at the ends of the proverbial horseshoe. But that’s in keeping with modern Republican mythology about Trump’s movement reflecting a supposed silent majority: If the only people who count as “real Americans” are those on Team MAGA, then sure, a coalition that runs the gamut from left-leaning Putin apologists to right-leaning Putin apologists is a fair portrait of America.

The other thing that struck me was that Republicans evidently believe this image benefits them politically. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place as a country where Donald Trump is no longer weird enough in his own right to lock down “the weird vote” this fall and needs cover on his weirdo flank from the likes of Kennedy and Gabbard. Worse, he and his party seem to think there are more votes to be had by appealing to that weirdo bloc than there are to be lost among normie voters by doing so.

Nick Cattogio

The Dumb Crank Party

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. … The problem is that this hasn’t actually changed the fact that lots of people are dumb cranks; it’s simply created a Dumb Crank Party. And on balance, I think that has eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.

Matt Yglesias via The Morning Dispatch

Snare

My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

CPAC

CPAC was still a depressing place to be, a revival meeting for political fanatics. Only, instead of selling hope, the speakers were preaching anger and resentment.

Jon Ward, Testimony

Trump

Railing against the unpersuadables

A wise man once said that the business of punditry is persuasion. Assuming that’s true, we won’t be conducting any business today.

That’s because the subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem.

Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one: The right prides itself on being patriotic, and patriots rightly celebrate service members for the sacrifices they’ve made to defend America. If Trump were to stoop to his usual boorishness in attacking an opponent’s military record, it was thought, he might at last discover a line he’s not allowed to cross.

How naive we were. The rest of this column could be spent revisiting his various affronts to military honor over the years: goofing on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam; “feuding” with a Muslim Gold Star family in 2016; confiding in aides that he didn’t want wounded veterans in a parade because it “doesn’t look good for me;” declining to visit an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 for fear, allegedly, that his hair would get wet in the rain; saying on the same trip, according to four separate sources cited by The Atlantic, that the cemetery was “filled with losers” and that the Marines at Belleau Wood were “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.

John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who went on to become Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed all of it on the record to CNN last October. According to The Atlantic, when Trump accompanied Kelly in 2017 on a visit to the grave of the general’s son Robert, who was himself killed in Afghanistan years earlier, he turned to Kelly and said of the fallen, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

In a test of credibility between a man with a dubious record of draft deferments on the one hand and a highly decorated officer who lost his son in combat on the other, it’s no contest: The right chooses to believe that Kelly, not Trump, is the liar. That’s what being “persuasion-proof” means …

All of this feels familiar, no?

Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it.

He succeeded at Arlington and might yet succeed in the other matter. That’s what happens when a gangster by temperament leads a gang that includes millions of people: In nearly every dispute, the personal cost of litigating that dispute will be greater for his opponents than it will be for him. Not coincidentally, according to military sources who spoke to the New York Times, the reason the cemetery employee chose not to press charges over the alleged altercation is that “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” an entirely reasonable concern.

…

Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so?

Nick Catoggio, Mourning in America

Transactional Trump

Trump was never on the social conservatives’ side. He courted them and sought their approval as a function of his desire for status, power, and his own aggrandizement. If they had achieved political results that could benefit him, he would still be seeking their support, but now he sees them as an obstacle and an embarrassment. If you are seeking to manipulate, influence, or transact business with Trump by all means flatter him, but always understand that he was never your friend and will always turn on you the moment you pose an obstacle to his ambitions.

Analysis of an anonymous friend of Rod Dreher

No Pro-Life Case for Trump

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a philandering womanizer and twice divorced serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of rape, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who was closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even joked about Epstein’s alleged pedophiliac assaults of children, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who refused to straightforwardly answer when asked if he has ever paid for an abortion, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

Jake Meador, There Never Was a Pro-Life Case for Trump

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Monday, 7/29/24

From nobody’s Synaxarion except mine: On this, the 29th day of July, we commemorate the chastening of Tipsy the not-yet-Orthodox, who was wounded in a stupid motorcycle accident in Lafayette in the year 1965.

Politics

Be it remembered

The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Liz Cheney via Peggy Noonan, Liz Cheney Shows What Leadership Looks Like, January 14, 2021.

If only the GOP had more persons with balls like Liz Cheney’s! Speaking of which …

Toxic Masculinity rightly so called

The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men … Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. [Admiral William] McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

There’s a seductive quality to Trump’s masculinity. Grievance is a form of counterfeit purpose, and anger is a form of counterfeit courage. For a time, your grievance can give you a mission — fighting the hated foe. And when you’re in the midst of an online temper tantrum, taking on all comers in your social media feed, you can feel a little bit brave, even if all you’re doing is tapping out vitriolic posts from the safety and comfort of your couch.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like [VP Candidate JD] Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boys. And if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

David French, Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

So what?

It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.

A “dissent” to something Andrew Sullivan said.

Hyperbole aside, I don’t much care if Trump does say that. There’s no way a constitutional amendment to that effect would pass within 3 years or so (i.e., in time for him to run again) — if ever.

Kamala

I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

Kamala Harris (via Andrew Sullivan)

What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey.

…

Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.

Andrew Sullivan

JD Vance has said some things he needs to explain or walk back. But so has Kamala Harris — at least when she’s not utterly vacuous in a pseudo-smart sort of way.

Public Affairs

Beacon of hope

Matthew Crawford is a guy with a PhD who still, compulsively, does things with his hands. Thus, he sometimes needs tools — like an “indicator base.”

The one from Harbor Freight was a real POS, as apparently are most things from there, their “thing” being selling really cheap Chinese stuff. He went to Grainger for a replacement:

The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones. The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto.

…

My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe.

And so forth and so on. But there’s a better alternative, with some trade-offs:

I could end on this gloomy note. But let me tell you about another industrial supply house, McMaster-Carr, because the difference is remarkable. (They are my go-to source, but they have no storefronts as Grainger does, and I wanted my indicator base immediately.)

…

My point is that the catalogue [“3,592 pages of dense type”] is written as though it matters, by people involved with material things. They want to sell stuff that enables people to do things. How is this allowed in 2024?!

The answer is surely connected to the fact that this family business, with 1,000 employees, which opened in the Chicago Loop in 1901, remains private, while Grainger is publicly traded. McMaster is said to be “secretive”, but a business intelligence site says the company “has historically raised $0 in funding,” meaning it has no debt. Meaning, it isn’t subject to the imperatives of what I like to call “systematized irrationality.”  Global capital isn’t just impatient for returns, it is invested in models of reality that offer portability and scalability, allowing metrics to be applied across sectors and industries and communicated to people sitting in high-rise office buildings. Legibility-from-afar always means partial and hence fake legibility. It can be achieved by substituting representations for reality, but representations of a particular kind: they must be emptied of rich layers of content derived from the situated knowledge of particular practices – the very practices in which you might use the tool or material in question. This entails the destruction of knowledge, for the sake of uniformity and financial abstraction.

By contrast, the McMaster-Carr catalogue is like a modern-day version of Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If the final cataclysm were to happen, but you somehow had access to the catalogue and everything in it, you would be able to reconstruct the modern world. They have kept finance and IT in their proper place.

I decidedly do not work with my hands (unless you count typing). I used to be pretty handy in a general sort of way, but it’s gone away from decades of disuse. (My son must have picked up his dual mind-hand propensities from his maternal grandfather. His musical keyboard abilities are a total mystery. Milkman?)

But I can appreciate Crawford, and his story, and a privately-held company that does things right.

No storefronts? No problem!

Irish microcosm

Ardnacrusha was a revolutionary piece of technology in its time, enabling the newly-independent Irish state to provide huge amounts of electricity for a nation for which it was still a rarity (you can see fascinating photos and accounts of its construction here and here.) But the march of the Machine has consequences. In this case, those consequences included a 90% collapse in the salmon population of the Shannon, which previously had been world-famous for its salmon runs, along with the mass death of trout and eels, the silting up of parts of the waterway, an increase in flooding and the raising of the water level of Lough Derg.

Still at least Ireland now has a carbon-free electricity supply, right? Well, no. When it was built, Ardnacrusha was the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world, until it was beaten to that title by America’s Hoover Dam. On completion, it produced enough power to meet the electricity demand of the whole of Ireland. Today it produces just 2% of it. That’s how much the thirst for electricity has increased in one short century. An astonishing seventy per cent of all that electricity will be swallowed by Internet server farms by the end of this decade.

Behold! Sustainability!

…

The giant wind turbines – subject to similar local protests across the land – are the latest Big Tech solution to the power ‘needs’ of the country: ‘needs’ which have accelerated a thousandfold in a century, and will continue to do so. Everybody wants insta-access to the shiny flicky pictures on the little Satanic Rectangle in their back pockets, but nobody wants to live in the middle of the power station needed to supply it. Well, get used to it, people, because the whole landscape will be a power station soon. Then there’ll be nowhere to hide except inside your VR headsets. Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!

Paul Kingsnorth

Music today

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world—namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms—are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.

We can’t afford to let that happen. So, as you might guess, I have an easy time picking (2) above as my chosen pathway.

And it’s not just my opinion. Plato and Socrates finally came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. Is it too much to hope that the people who control our music economy will eventually make that same discovery?

Ted Gioia

“Private” matters

Remembering Crunchy Rod

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right

Crunchy Cons was my introduction to Rod Dreher, and I liked it very much. “Beauty is more important than efficiency”? now that is counter-cultural!

I rather miss that sunnier, more optimistic version of him — which I did not read as a way forward for the GOP so much as a way forward for the culture. Speaking of which …

Living decently

What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does—can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, and honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization.

— Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return,” in A Continuous Harmony (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), page 51, via Gracy Olmstead

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday politics

Convention and its dramatis personae

Convention tidbits

All political conventions are cringe-worthy idolatry fests. But even by those low standards, there was so much abject Trump flattery going on among his cultish speakers that if this had been Kim Jong-un’s convention, he’d have told his propagandists, “Hey, fellas, dial it back a little.”

Matt Labash

I do not take idolatry as a harmless pecadillo.

Trump made many false claims about immigration throughout his remarks, but the most absurd was: “You know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward

How does one take that “seriously but not literally”?

Compared with Trump’s acceptance speeches in 2016 and 2020, which were unusual enough, this one was unrestrained, self-indulgent and undisciplined, radiating a sense of grievance. It was Trump untethered, which is the right way to understand what his second term would be. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Peter Wehner

Oh give him a break. He’s an old man who has a limited playlist.

60 seconds of unified tone

It was then that Trump struck the tone of national unity that he had teased in interviews leading up to the convention, promising to be a president for all Americans. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said. “I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation, to every citizen. Whether you’re young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic—I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship. Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.”

That unified tone last for about … a full 60 seconds. No, Trump went on to spend most of the more than 90-minute speech—the longest nomination acceptance speech in modern history—riffing on old motifs like, as Drucker put it on Dispatch Live late last night, the Grateful Dead at a jam: Same song, different flavor. Far from revealing a changed man, reformed by a near-death experience, Trump’s speech showed a man unchained and more-or-less as he’s ever been.

The Morning Dispatch

Hold onto your hat

We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.

…

It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week. This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent. Mr. Trump’s speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot.

…

A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror. But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.

Peggy Noonan

Bootstrapping

Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear. 

One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.

Kevin D. Williamson

But Kevin: Isn’t this pretty low-hanging fruit? Won’t any Presidential or Vice-Presidential nominee be, ipso facto, “privileged”? Does every up-from-poverty success per se disprove a populist “they’re screwing you” pitch to those still in poverty? Isn’t Biden screwing “the working man” by forgiving elites’ student loans? Have I left out any Latin shorthand?

Let’s try another language then. ¿Porque no los dos? Why can’t oppression be real yet surmountable for a few?

Absolution and a call for revenge

Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.

Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the cities (and there were more than a few who didn’t, to be sure) stressed the importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility. They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those old-school, center-right views.

So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.

Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.

Tom Nichols, Hillbilly Excuses

What jumped out at me here wasn’t “JD Vance is a phony” but “Republicans are now treating dysfunctional white people as Democrats once treated black people” (and unlike Vance, I’m old enough personally to remember those days).

In this, Tom Nichols is running on a track perfectly parallel to Kevin D. Williamson:

I’d been writing about lower-class, mainly white dysfunction for a few years at that point, and Vance had just published his famous book, which I had reviewed in Commentary. I admired his work tremendously—and, naturally, envied him some, too. We had a good conversation. 

Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become … has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every few years and seeing it decline. 

Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the Rust Belt: Nothing happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has been poor since.

(See more of this Williamson column above)

Second-hand synthesis

Synthesizing what I read of it, the GOP Convention was a big, cheerful, sexy, vulgar, idolatrous pagan bacchanalia.

Of course, when the line between enthusiasm and idolatry is crossed at a political convention can be subtle, but I’m in a Christian tradition oft-accused of idolatry for saying of the Theotokos and the Saints things less hyperbolic than were repeatedly said of Trump this week.

One silver lining: Zombie Reaganism is as good and truly dead as conservatism in GOP version 2024.

Twixt now and November

Still beatable?

After beginning his speech with calls for unity — “There is no victory in winning for half of America” — the former president turned the convention into a Trump rally, attacking “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and slamming Biden by name after Republicans said that he would rise above the insults and not mention the president.

He ripped into Democrats on Social Security, Medicare, the border and energy policy, saying America was “stupid” under Biden while ad-libbing about Hannibal Lecter and having the next Republican convention in Venezuela.

Trump was suddenly thin on the unity and heavy on the unhinged, as his speech became tiresome and stretched past midnight on the East Coast. Biden may have messed up the June debate, but Trump’s own cognitive functioning was messing up the July convention.

Patrick Healy, Trump Goes Off the Rails. This Guy Is Still Beatable

Where the Democratic opportunity lies

[T]he problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness …

Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism; our home was something we were building together. Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century ….

David Brooks, What Democrats Need to Do Now

On the other hand …

[C]anceling student loan debt would be a massive unforced error for the newly minted Biden administration. It would show that one of the new Democratic president’s highest priorities during a pandemic and a destabilizing economic shock is to provide a bailout to people who are overwhelmingly likely to end up as members of the upper-middle class. It would amount to a transfer payment from contractors and service workers to high-earning knowledge workers and other white-collar employees. As such, it would also accelerate trends in the Democratic Party that would leave it vulnerable to a Republican Party increasingly trying to rebrand itself as a champion of the working class.

…

As economist Thomas Piketty and others have pointed out in recent years, center-left political parties suffer at the ballot-box when they come to represent the interests of the upper-middle class at the expense of the working class, allowing the nationalist-populist right to make inroads with the latter. This has happened in a series of European countries in recent years, and it’s happening in the U.S. as well, with the Democrats enjoying surging support in inner-ring suburbs but losing ground in working-class, exurban, and rural areas. In the 2020 election, Democrats were able to defeat Donald Trump with this coalition, but they got tripped up down ballot, most likely falling short of a Senate majority, losing seats in the House, and failing to flip even a single state legislature.

…

Sixty-five percent of Americans haven’t graduated from a four-year college. Will that large majority really favor a multi-billion-dollar bailout for people who hold those degrees when their indebtedness was freely taken on and has granted them a credential that gives them a ticket to lifetime higher earnings?

Damon Linker, The Class Folly of Canceling Student Loans (11/18/2020)

I don’t know that Trump or Vance has spoken about this, but if I judge persuadable undecideds accurately, they should, because despite warnings from people like Linker, Biden pandered to the wealthy in this way and others.

Whence conspiracism?

When you don’t know how things work, everything looks like a conspiracy.

Jonah Goldberg

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, 7/13/24

Democrats’ “revealed preference”

[I]t’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.
…
Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.
…
I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.
…
The idea of an anti-Trump “coalition of all democratic forces” has been prominent in the media and the commentariat, and there you have seen big shifts and concessions. But these have mostly been made by anti-Trump conservatives and ex-conservatives moving leftward, not by the political coalition that they’re joining.

Ross Douthat

Douthat goes on to concede some ways in which the Democrats’ approach may not be cynical and deceptive, but I’ve quoted enough. For the rest, my link gets you past the paywall.

Smart people swapping stupid barbs?

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is so transgressive as to demand the immediate intervention of the Supreme Court.

Jamelle Bouie, proving that smart people with blind spots can write stupid things.

If only Bouie had written

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, combined with Trump’s pledge to prosecute Joe Biden and lower court rulings that President’s have no immunity from criminal prosecution, are so transgressive as to demand intervention of the Supreme Court

I wouldn’t have bothered writing my own stupid things.

Lies in service of “higher truths”

This past week, a Pennsylvania man was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old boy. The man allegedly lured the boy to his death through Grindr, a gay hookup app. The boy’s last Snapchat image was posted at 2:30 in the morning, on a dark road, with the comment that he was just out for a late-night walk. Nobody ever heard from him again.

Several grim and (one would think) obvious lessons should immediately present themselves to all concerned adults here. However, it appears that the adults are determined not to learn them, because this particular boy believed he was a girl. Consequently, all their energy has been spent on making sure nobody “misgenders” him in death, using him as a mascot of “anti-trans” violence, and taking the opportunity to lobby for new “hate-crime” legislation.

…

[The Free Press sent Ben Kawaller to Laramie, Wyoming, to talk to people about Matthew Shepard, murdered there in 1998 and lionized ever since.]

One resistant young gay man asks Ben what’s to be gained by reassessing the crime. Ben asks whether he would agree that it’s worthwhile simply because the reassessment might be true. The young man pauses for a moment, then stutters a bit, casting about. “There’s a point when you as a person should look around and see, like…read the room. And what has happened, this is really important, the, the…understanding of what happened to Matthew means a lot to a lot of people. So just leave it alone.”

Notice that this young man isn’t even bothering to debate the history or discredit Jimenez. He is saying that even if Jimenez were right, it wouldn’t matter. The truth wouldn’t matter.

Bethel McGrew, What is Truth?

After careful consideration, I decided last fall not to sit out a performance of Considering Matthew Shepard by a chorus I’ve been in for more than two decades now.

Considering Matthew Shepard is a sort of cantata on the murder of young Shepard. I carefully scrutinized the libretto for any explicit perpetuation of the Matthew Shepard myth (i.e., that it was the quintessential anti-gay hate crime) and found none. I considered the feelings of my fellow-choristers and the Artistic Director who programmed it. I also considered the “meta” point that the piece never would have been composed (and nobody would attend if it had been composed) were it not for the prevalence of the myth, and that performing it probably perpetuates the myth tacitly. My decision to go ahead and sing may have been sub-optimal. I’m still not sure.

But I want people to know that there’s almost zero truth to the myth — the standard Matthew Shepard narrative that gave us the federal “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes” law — and almost no poetry to the truth. If you want to know the grimier and better-substantiated counter-narrative, it’s readily available.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Friday, 7/12/2

Culture

Anti-Christian, anti-religion, anti-tradition

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Creepier than frank laxity

Just don’t do it again, promise? Remember those kids who got suspended from Harvard after setting up encampments on the lawn and then harassing other students? Well, the Harvard College Administrative Board has reversed the decision, a win for the “student intifada,” which I thought was slanderous but is actually just what they call themselves. And then over at Columbia, the administrators who texted each other vomit emojis during a panel discussing a rabbi’s op-ed about his fears for Jews on campus—they were fired, right? Well, actually they were just put on leave and will be assigned to different jobs later. And remember the Columbia students who were arrested after they occupied a campus building? Most of their charges were dropped. There’s something way creepier about punishing people in the moment only to reverse it as soon as the zeitgeist moves on to the next thing versus not punishing them at all.

Suzy Weiss

Prescient

This was not written of Team Biden, but it sure seems to fit:

The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

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

Not a flattering juxtaposition

  • In The Guardian, Marina Hyde: “It’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.”

Via Frank Bruni. (I didn’t call this “Politics” because it’s foreign politics.)

Enemies of Article III

Federal Court critics

Never forget, most commentary about the Supreme Court is performative. Critics have a vested interest in making the decisions seem so much worse than they really are.

Josh Blackman, Everyone Needs To Take A Deep Breath About Trump v. United States

AOC, ever-performative, is “trying” to impeach Justices Alito and Thomas — a kind of performative commentary uniquely available to congress-critters.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, supported by left-wing interest groups, demanded that Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals recuse himself from a case challenging the CFPB’s rule on credit-card late fees. One of Judge Willett’s child college savings accounts held around $2,000 of stock in Citigroup, which wasn’t a party to the case.

…

Normally, parties to a lawsuit have a strong incentive not to provoke judges with baseless recusal demands. That makes it surprising the CFPB would join in such an unwarranted demand. But the bureau seems to be more an extension of certain Democratic politicians these days than a federal agency respectful of the rule of law. Several members of Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, responded to the committee’s opinion with a hyperbolic letter declaring that the opinion and Judge Willett’s decision not to recuse himself “represent ongoing threats to the integrity of the judicial system.”

…

Recusal tactics have become more outrageous. Normally, only parties directly involved in the litigation can file a motion to recuse a judge for an alleged conflict of interest. But we now see coordinated campaigns to pressure recusals. Left-wing interest groups are submitting demands for recusal, coupled with press releases and press conferences. This practice should stop. There is no formal mechanism for outsiders to file such recusal demands, and for good reason. They clog courts with additional briefings and hearings, causing delays and distorting outcomes. Courts should refuse to entertain these ill-intended requests, and the lawyers and litigants responsible should be subjected to sanctions.

Theodore B. Olson, Proliferating Recusal Demands Threaten the Judiciary

Politics, more or less

What liberal democracy sounds like

In America, it can be easy to forget what liberal democracy sounds like. But it used to sound something like this:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all of our successes and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent public-spirited man who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door, and as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in this increasingly unstable world.

Those are the words of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak in his farewell speech last week outside Number 10, Downing Street. This is how Keir Starmer responded:

I want to thank the outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, his achievement as the first British-Asian prime minister of our country. The extra effort that that will have required should not be underestimated by anyone, and we pay tribute to that today. And we also recognize the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership.

He went on:

If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not, in fact, especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.

And, if you listen to them say these words, they even seemed to mean it. That’s what it takes to put a toxically divided country back on track toward liberal democracy, after a woundingly divisive period centered on Brexit.

No one claimed fraud. No one derided the lopsided unfairness of the parliamentary results, where Labour got 34 percent of the vote and a whopping 63 percent of the seats, and where the new rightist Reform Party won 14 percent of the vote and got only 5 seats. Those were the rules ahead of the game, and they were the rules everyone had agreed to.

There is one reason and one reason only why this kind of conciliatory exchange cannot happen any time soon in America, and that is Donald J. Trump ….

Andrew Sullivan, pitch-perfect.

I wish it were true that Trump is the whole problem, but he tapped into something that won’t go away just because he sheds this mortal coil.

Art of the Deal

  • “That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.” (George Will on the Dem/MSM bunker)
  • “If Trump is elected again, Dems should get over it and try to do more deals with him like they did on the USMCA and First Step Act. Trump isn’t an ideologue and just has an enormous ego anyone can exploit,” – Zaid Jilani.
  • “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do,” – Josh Hawley.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Comments:

  • Zaid Jilani’s advice is brilliant! We need more like that!
  • There is all kinds of play in the joints of “Christian Nationalism,” but any politician of Josh Hawley’s intelligence who demagogues the term is playing with fire and is going to find me unmoved when he tries to disambiguate it into something benign. Once a bright hope for the GOP, he’s gone shamelessly whoring after Trump.

You can have my delegates when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers

In his selfish desperation to retain control of his party, the president has resorted to political hostage-taking. His pitch to Democrats for sticking with him has nothing to do with sketching out a compelling plan to win or demonstrating his mental agility by holding numerous live events or even outlining a policy program for a second term. It’s simply this: The delegates he earned by winning this year’s primary (under false pretenses about his fitness) are pledged to him and he’s not giving them up.

Nick Catoggio, The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room

The window into Trump’s id

The best window into Trump’s ignorant and destructive id is often his Truth Social account. While normal Americans were making plans for Independence Day, an obsessive on Truth Social was declaring, “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason. Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.” “Retruth,” in the idiom of Truth Social, means “to repost.” Trump of course retruthed. The former president also took time to retruth a post calling for Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, and a dozen prominent Democrats to be jailed because they saw fit to tell the American people the truth that the 2020 “elections were fair.” Republicans would be wise to remember that character is destiny and that Trump has never had any.

National Review, The Week

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Culture

Made Men

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perennial favorite for the internet age

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 Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Another oldie

To say that we and the Soviet Union are to be compared is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes the old lady into the way of an oncoming bus, and the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, are both people who push old ladies around.

William F. Buckley via Douglas Murray

New Illustration for the Urban Dictionary

Cringe: It’s like this.

(H/T Nellie Bowles)

Owning the full weight of your worldview

One doesn’t see this sort of observation much any more:

Reason is an absolute … Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

Good Dad

Dad only had three stages in his day. He was either (1) drinking coffee, (2) had just finished drinking coffee, or (3) was brewing a fresh pot right now.

Ted Gioia, How Coffee Became a Joke. Unlike Ted, I rather like Starbucks, but the only frou-frou I ever ordered was one, and only ever one, Pumpkin Spice Latté, just to see what the buzz was about. Otherwise, I’m happy with whatever dark roast is on offer or even Pike Place if necessary.

Ruso-Ukraine war and NATO

Be it remembered:

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.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.

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

And recently, we’ve had people in the know bragging that we are going to bring Ukraine itself into NATO, though “we have neither the resources nor the intention” of following through by vigorously defending, with troops, a new member that was already under attack when admitted to NATO.

Campus Protests

Coddled2

[S]ociety takes the attitudes and antics of the young far too seriously. In an era when we are reliably informed that adolescence persists well into the twenties, it is strange that we deem the views of anyone under the age of thirty to have any real significance or merit. Yet it seems to be an unspoken assumption that young people, especially young, angry, and opinionated people, are to be indulged as important … 

This exaltation of youth is simultaneously the exaltation of ignorance and incompetence. Early claims of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the continued sloppy use of the language of genocide, fueled by people at the U.N. who could benefit from using a dictionary, are two obvious examples of the former. As for the latter, when, for example, did adult revolutionaries hold hunger strikes lasting a whole twelve hours or seize buildings and then demand that the university authorities give them food and water? I have no affection for Che Guevara, but he did at least spend time in a Bolivian jungle while trying to foment revolution. I presume he never once considered whining to the Bolivian government about the harsh conditions of jungle life and had to find his own food and water. A cynic might say that even our revolutionaries are pathetic these days.

Carl R. Trueman, ‌What the Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests Are Really About

One of the voices on the Matter of Opinion podcast Friday likened Columbia University getting police to clear our an occupied hall to “calling the police on your own kids” because the University is in loco parentis. I think the voice belonged to someone named “Van Winkle.”

I was in college when students effectually abolished in loco parentis. They didn’t want anyone telling them what to do and what not to do. But, giving credit to Ms. Van Winkle, they did generally whistle a different tune when there was the threat of police being brought in.

I’ve long thought take your pick; you don’t deserve protective in loco parentis (“we’ll take care of this ourselves, officer”) if you’re not willing to live by university rules (“here’s the rules you’re expected to live by”).

Radical Revolutionaries on the cheap

And of course the protesters all want (and I’m sure will get) the arrests taken off their records. They want to be radical revolutionaries holding a radical protest. They also want the protest catered ASAP. And when it’s done for summer, they want good grades in all the classes and squeaky-clean records. McKinsey doesn’t staff itself!

Nellie Bowles.

Another thing I seem to remember is that civil disobedience includes taking the consequences for breaking an unjust law. Scott free for breaking a just law does not compute.

Forewarding illiberalism

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League.

…

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

Andrew Sullivan

Politics

Life in the Stupid Party

(I don’t remember the source, but someone called our two major parties the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.)

The so-called hard right in the House is learning an old lesson: Life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

Kevin D. Williamson

On Democrats’ promise to help defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to oust Speaker Mike Johnson:

Republicans, rather than fume that Democrats have denied them a chance to self-destruct, should consider that perhaps this is the inevitable result of the mid-session motion-to-vacate game that has brought them to the brink of losing their majority without an intervening election. A conference that can’t bear to see any of its members lead the House will soon enough encounter a cure for that.

National Review, The Week email for 5/3/24.

Meanwhile, over at the Evil Party

Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject’s politics.

Matt Taibbi via James Howard Kunstler

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Flash! Sex Matters!

Health

Sex matters

The United Kingdom’s National Health Services (NHS) plans to propose changes to its constitution that would separate single-sex wards according to “biological sex,” Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins announced Tuesday. The new measure would mean that transgender individuals would be placed in wards with people of their biological sex or in a single-patient room when possible. “The government has been clear that biological sex matters,” Atkins said. “The constitution proposal makes clear what patients can expect from NHS services in meeting their needs, including the different biological needs of the sexes.” The NHS Constitution of England was last updated in 2015 and is required to be updated at least every ten years; there will now be an eight-week review of the proposal.

Via The Morning Dispatch

Judgment Day’s coming

[I]t won’t just be doctors and politicians whose actions will be judged in relation to the excesses surrounding the gender transition of young people, but also those many journalists who’ve chosen to prioritize ideological fashion over journalistic integrity. Singal stands out as one of the few honourable exceptions. Indeed, Bell’s case is exactly the sort of tragedy that he’s consistently warned about over the past five years. To a certain kind of ideologue, such prescience is unforgiveable.

The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal—And Why It Matters

Journalism

Keeping up appearances

Per Politico, Biden’s flacks are frustrated with the Times because it is “stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality.” Key word: appearance.

The Free Press

Wrinkles to iron out

No wonder American consumers are gloomier than they have been at any point in the last two years. The consumer confidence index dropped for the third straight month in April. (Axios)

The Free Press

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this confusing cause and effect?

Protest

Why are they saying this where they’re saying it?

National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke has a question for the pro-Palestinian student protesters continuing their encampment on Columbia University’s campus: “Why, exactly, are these protests happening at all?” he asked. “By this, I don’t mean, ‘What is it that the protesters are saying?’ I know that. By this, I mean, ‘Why is it that they are saying it where they are saying it?’ The faculty at Columbia is not in charge of Israel or the Israeli military; it does not set American foreign policy; and it did not contrive any of the historical or geopolitical questions that underpin the broader fight. I daresay that there are students at Columbia who, for whatever reason, are vexed by the state of the world, but to take this out on their fellow students and the staff at their school makes no more sense than to take it out on the staff at Pedro’s Deli. The two things do not, in any meaningful way, even come close to intersecting. … Sometimes, silence really is golden—even if you’re a discontented college student who has just discovered that life isn’t fair.”

The Morning Dispatch

I posted this on a social medium and got some friendly push-back to the effect that if you can’t protest where you are, where can you protest. Then a third person weighed in with something more helpful, I think, than my post or the first response:

Demands that Western institutions divest from South Africa (of which protests were a part) were successful enough to play a significant role in ending apartheid. So, no, you don’t have to go to Tel Aviv to camp out and yell. But I do think you ought to have a strategy, particularly if your protest is going to disrupt other people’s lives: by what process or mechanism do I hope that my actions (help to) effect the change I desire?

There is, somewhere around here, a sign, professionally constructed and publicly posted, demanding that the Raleigh City Council stop the genocide in Gaza. Not that the city council divest from Israel or condemn the actions of the Israeli government, but that they literally “stop the genocide.” I don’t think “self-indulgent” is necessarily the word, but the complete implausibility of the demand is certainly not a sign of a healthy democracy.

Enablers as “basic humanitarian aid”

At a press conference in front of the occupied academic building at Columbia University: 

Reporter: “Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?” 

Student protester: “To allow it to be brought in. Well, I mean, I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?”

Reporter: “But they did put themselves in that, very deliberately in that situation, in that position, so it seems like you’re saying, ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over the building, now would you please bring us some food and water.’”

For the record, I don’t have strong feelings about this Spring’s demonstrations, nor do I want to have strong feelings.

Culture

Surveillance Capitalismn

When you first heard of the existence of an “internet-enabled rectal thermometer,” you might have thought to yourself, why does a rectal thermometer need enabling by the internet? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. But the internet needs to know the temperature inside your rectum. If you find this intrusive, or extraneous to the purpose for which you bought a thermometer, you may not be ready for an autonomous car. Give yourself an adjustment period. With time, your expectations will dilate to accommodate the probing style of your new friend.

Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive

Deschooling

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Governmental truth

Hobbes … believed that the state’s stability depended on uniformity of religious belief, or at least uniformity of religious expression. Locke, by contrast, argued that force cannot save souls because it cannot change hearts, and even if it could, governments cannot be relied upon to discern religious truth.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (emphasis added).

What government can be relied upon to do is to buttress itself with religion-like accoutrements.

Reassuring stories

Betrayed again — It hurts so good!

Having won the field, the Trumpists now are the Republican Party. Mike Johnson … is one of them. He may not be as dumb as Marjorie Taylor Greene or as likely to give you a handjob in public as Rep. Lauren Boebert, but he’s 100 percent organic, non-GMO Peckerwood. Nevertheless, according to the rules of the Peckerwood game, he’s structurally the enemy: Peckerwoods, once they achieve positions such as speaker of the House, cease to be Peckerwoods, and become the Establishment. Remember, this isn’t politics—this is therapeutic storytelling, and the Peckerwoods have only the one story: “We, the Real Americans, have been betrayed, once again, by the Establishment.” That’s their whole thing.

Kevin D. Williamson. Another one worth reading in full.

Dispossession

Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust. The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not intellectual problems. The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.

David Brooks, How to Destroy Truth

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

It’s almost over

Not that the replacement of our 2023 calendars with 2024 will necessarily make a difference, but a guy can hope, can’t he?

Legalia

New York Times vs. OpenAI

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the companies exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or authorization to train their AI systems—including the chatbot ChatGPT—and “wrongfully benefited from” the Times’ journalism. “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works,” the paper argued in the filing.

The Morning Dispatch

Non-lawyers may find puzzling the thought that the main job of law schools is to teach people to think like lawyers. What the heck does that mean?

Among other things, it means that I cannot read an item like this without thinking this is how the common law develops: gripes and competing analogies.

True example: Early in the days of petroleum, Defendant, seeing Plaintiff getting rich off oil wells, slant-drills and taps the same pool of crude oil under Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff sues, saying he owns everything within his borders from the infernal depths to the furthest skies. Defendant says the crude oil is like a highly mobile animal (a “wild, fugacious mineral-animal” was my property law prof’s description) which is rightfully owned by whoever captures it.

Eventually, a body of law develops from the resolutions of multiple cases, each with some different nuances.

So, is OpenAI like a slant-driller? How did those slant-drilling cases resolve? If the answer were obvious, there’d be no lawsuits or they would quickly settle.

An analyst for Yahoo Finance opines:

The way generative AI works by training on existing data and generating new creative content and text is something that intellectual property as a legal framework has not had to deal with. We’re going to have to litigate and get the ruling from the court.

So this is a very important case that I wouldn’t be surprised that if it doesn’t go all the way to the United States Supreme Court because this has to be settled for us to know what the framework is for generative AI.

That first paragraph describes classic common law development.

The second paragraph is dubious: the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases just because they’re important, and an important case filed in state court would likely not get SCOTUS to review it. But this is probably in Federal Court, since it’s under (federal) copyright law, so SCOTUS might take it if it doesn’t like the decision of the Court of Appeals that eventually reviews the District Court decision.

On whether Trump is disqualified

  1. I detest Donald Trump. It would be a great relief to me, though I cannot bring myself to pray for it, were he (and Joe Biden too, for that matter) to drop dead, soon. Some of his followers would spin conspiracy theories, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  2. At this stage of our absurdly-long pre-election run-up, it would be terribly, terribly, terribly divisive to exclude Trump from the ballot. What could serve more deeply to delegitimize the whole Presidential election next year?
  3. The legal arguments about the applicability of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are nuanced, and it’s not just about “insurrection.” The intent of the section was mostly to keep the former Confederate States from sending bomb-throwing racists to the House or Senate, with little worry about a bomb-throwing President, The language of the section arguably sweeps more broadly; but it dances all around naming the Presidency. Did the Reconstruction Congress hide an elephant (the Presidency) in a mouse-hole?
  4. Credible legal scholars deny that the Presidency is a “civil office” of the United States. For instance, Kurt Lash: “According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase ‘civil office under the United States’ did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential ‘Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,’ the congressional precedent known as ‘Blount’s Case’ established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase ‘civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.’“
  5. SCOTUS has tended to go with textual arguments rather than intent. I hope they either revert to intent or find a really persuasive textual reason to allow him on the ballot, and Joseph Story may be just the ticket. Some of Trump’s enemies would spin conspiracy theories or shit-talk SCOTUS, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
  6. Then, if Trump is still disappointingly alive and kicking on Election Day, I hope we collectively kick him to the curb by a really convincing margin. (This would be more realistic if the Democrats would turn their attention away from knee-capping Trump and toward a compelling centrist or center-left vision for 2025-2029.)

Culture

Racism

Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.

Bari Weiss, Stop Being Shocked.

Subrena E. Smith, a person of color as such things are styled, proposes that since we invented race for nefarious reasons, it’s time to banish it.

If terrorists win, it will be the transphobes’ fault

Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level … That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt

I’m reasonably confident that General Burt is highly educated, because only someone highly educated could believe such drivel:

You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes. I call “Bullshit” and “Shame on you for trying to shame us, General.”

This is a quote that has stuck with me. Yes, it’s a variation on a populist theme, but there’s enough truth to that theme that The Emperor’s New Clothes has become beloved.

Jung versus Freud

Having felt his own seething unconscious erupt into the midst of normal daylight reality served Jung well in his treatment of schizophrenic patients, who in Freud’s judgment were too far gone to reach, but whose bizarre hallucinations and delusions Jung attempted to comprehend with respect and tenderness. Unlike Freud, who maintained a studied distance from his patients, sitting aloof and serene out of the supine sufferer’s sight, Jung would sit face to face with his charges, bumping knees, exhorting with vehement gestures.

In Jung’s estimation, what healed was not disinterested mind alone following a dogmatic trail through the vast wastes of one’s sexual history, but making contact, demonstrating sympathy, aiming at a comprehensive understanding, allowing the free play of humanity at its best. Jung could see that for patients above the age of thirty-five — life’s halfway mark, or what Dante called nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — their principal concern was not undoing childhood psychosexual knots that persisted into adulthood, but rather finding the authoritative spiritual truth that one could found a serious life upon.

Algis Valiunas, Wounded Healers.

That kind of explains Jungian Jordan Peterson’s style, doesn’t it?

Adult movies — and literature

I used to say that an adult movie was one where they kiss and then the lights go out (because the adults know what comes next).

I’ve now read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, truly adult novels. What child could understand? A rare treat, too rich to binge-read. I can’t even face wading into Lila or Jack immediately.

Journalists are so predictable

After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.

Matti Friedman, The Wisdom of Hamas

Ain’t science great?

  • Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face.
  • By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data.

The Atlantic Science Desk, 81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023

Best Sentences of the Year

Frank Bruni has listed his favorite sentences of the year.

  • [B]ook critic Ron Charles … noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”
  • In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”
  • Of Kevin McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Ron DeSantis, gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024. (Mort Rosenblum)

While I don’t systematically gather, grade, and keep records on such things, I rather liked two sentences from Daniel Henninger:

The most fraudulent word in higher education is “dialogue.” Real dialogue died years ago, replaced by a soft-pillow politics that envelops anything disagreeable and then smothers it.

Speaking of higher education:

Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.

Greg Conti, The Rise of the Sectarian University (Compact Mag) I’m seeing enough good stuff from Compact (which registered with me at its founding) to consider paying its pricey subscription price.

After all the hype, it turns out that “Trump without the crazy” is just an awkward, aggrieved, opportunistic, anti-charismatic, aspiring autocrat with a mile-wide cruel streak and the people skills of Mark Zuckerberg crossed with Richard Nixon.

Michelle Cottle, The Best, Worst and Weirdest Political Stories of 2023

On blogging

Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.

Venkatesh Rao via Alan Jacobs

Politics

Holiday greetings

… MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I think you probably know who posted that on TruthSocial.

“Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.

Nick Catoggio, Farewell to Normalcy — The meaning of 2023

If Trump wins …

If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination for the third straight time and then prevails in the general election, he will have sealed the transformation of his party, given new energy to right-wing populism around the world, and called into question the principles that have shaped America’s security policy since World War II.

Voters will have ratified the outlook that Mr. Trump has advocated since the 1980s: opposition to immigration, multilateral trade treaties and globalization. They would give him the opportunity to enact more extreme proposals in his second term—including an all-out attack on the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and the use of the military to fight crime, immigration and domestic dissent. They would embrace his view of the press as the enemy of the people and agree to an all-out culture war led from the White House. After hearing Mr. Trump declare across the country that “for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” they will have replied, in effect, “Retribution is exactly what we want. Use the government to punish our enemies.”

William Galston

Adulting for the children’s sake

Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out.

Peggy Noonan

… 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 (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.

Saturday, 1/7/23

Culture

Jordan Peterson

“The Campaign to Re-Educate Jordan Peterson” reminds me of how little written about Peterson. That isn’t likely to change because I just can’t take the time to get more than a smattering of the Jordan Peterson content available, and I don’t want to write in ignorance.

I like what I’ve heard and read and seen, but I was making my bed before Jordan Peterson was out of diapers, and I don’t personally need his coaching on how to do life. If a lot of younger (mostly-)men find it beneficial, I’m sure they could do far worse than taking advice from him.

In recognition of his influence, though, I pray for him daily.

AI’s limits

I have been an AI skeptic, which extended to Chat GPT. Ezra Klein has a fantastic podcast on the topic, which I haven’t even finished yet.

My fundamental instinct was right: AI is closely akin to bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense that it bears no relationship to truth. What AI does — so far at least if not ever and always — is basically pastiche of things that it has read and stored in its memory banks.

But my skepticism overlooked the harm AI can do. To make a long story short, I don’t think I can ever trust the internet again for important research; it’s too easy for a single AI “clickfarms” to create a web of websites all pointing in the wrong direction, or pointing aimlessly, with alluring headlines and reciprocal hyperlinks to reinforce the bullshit.

And of course our enemies will be using AI in elections to make any Russian interference in the 2016 election negligible in comparison.

Conservatism and Woke Capital

When I see stories about how Indiana’s conservatism makes it hard to recruit and retain tech workers, I detect a PR campaign at work.

Big Business has been a solvent dissolving families and communities for at least a century, and the press increasingly is a lazy accomplice.

Launch credentials

Aaron Renn has moved to Substack, and The Masculinist is no more. I’m not shedding many tears over that, but I endorse this from #48:

I have a three-year-old, and my ambition for him is that he will not have to go to college. I hope that by the time he turns 18, there will be alternative paths for him to launch himself into life without having to spend the time and money that were previously expended to obtain these “launch” credentials.

Let’s be honest, for 95% of people, college is purely about vocational credentialing. They go to college so they can get a good job coming out of it. For most high paying positions today, a college degree is still the price of entry. In some professions, the amount of formal education required to practice is still going up.

But in others it’s changing in the opposite direction. And that change is a good thing, though we need a lot more of it.

Nellie Bowles excerpts

Red-letter day

I almost never agree with Josh Hawley since he re-invented himself as a populist pugilist, but he hit a right note here:

Standing with me is Josh Hawley, who this month encouraged young men to “log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date.”

Nellie Bowles, TGIF. All subsequent Nellie Bowles excerpts from the same January 6 post.

Enforcing a dubious orthodoxy

A new law in California paves the way for doctors to lose their license for “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.” That sort of behavior is now considered “unprofessional conduct.” 

Longtime TGIF readers know my stance, but for all the newcomers: Misinformation and disinformation are real phenomena. But most of the time these days the words are political terms applied to any information a ruling clique doesn’t like. Often, it’s used by progressive journalists who want to see various voices censored on social media. 

In the case of Covid, many, many very real facts were considered mis-and-disinfo. Like: The vaccine does not prevent transmission of Covid. That was considered fake news, verboten. Had this law been in place you would have lost your medical license for saying it. In that case, people saw with their own bodies that, although vaccinated, they were very much coughing. But thanks to this new law that muffles doctors, who knows what we won’t know going forward.

Pretendians

Another fantastically insane fake Native American: I’m beginning to think that any high profile Native American influencer should be assumed to be a white girl with a spray tan. The latest Pretendian, who is quite literally a white girl with a spray tan: Kay LeClaire. A major leader in the Indigenous movement, LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. She was a co-owner of giige, a “Queer and Native American-owned tattoo shop and artist collective in Madison, WI.” She was a community leader-in-Residence at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and was part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force. She has had copious speaking engagements, and she even led a name-change-mob, forcing the local music venue Winnebego to change its name for Indigenous sensitivity (it was named after its street). She sold crafts and clothes, all while pretending to be a Native American (that’s a federal crime, by the way). Obviously she also claims to be Two-Spirit, a sort of nonbinary identification long-practiced in Native cultures. 

She is in fact German, Swedish and French Canadian. An anonymous blogger identified the fraud.

On a related note, it’s a good time to read this article about how the official “Native American” population in the U.S. between the years 2010 and 2020 . . . doubled. Pretty soon every high school senior will be Native American. Little Harrison and Haisley will be touring the Princeton campus like, “why, yes, this is my ancestral feathered headdress, thanks for asking.”

Governors putting immigrants on buses to NYC

Wait . . . now Democrats are busing migrants to New York? Gov. Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, is busing migrants to New York City. And New York mayor Eric Adams is not happy about it, saying: “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation.”

Recall not three months ago, when busing migrants to New York was considered outrageous, potentially human trafficking, worthy of huge splashy headlines and endless features about the suffering these trips were causing. When the buses come from Colorado, surely the response will be the same? Of course not.

I just checked, and there is not a single story on The New York Times homepage right now. Polis describes his busing program to NYC versus the essentially identical Republican busing program to NYC as “night and day.” Because, Polis says: “We are respecting the agency and the desires of migrants who are passing through Colorado. We want to help them reach their final destination, wherever that is.”

You really should subscribe to the Free Press on Substack.

Politics

From earlier in the week:

Wise words

In 1992 [David Letterman] was famously passed over to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show” in favor of Jay Leno. Months passed, Mr. Leno’s ratings wobbled, NBC offered Mr. Letterman a second chance. And even though he was now fielding better offers from other networks and syndicators, he still had to have Carson—it was his dream from childhood to succeed that brilliant performer, have that show. He couldn’t give it up.

His advisers, in the crunch, told him a truth that is said to have released him from his idée fixe. There is no Johnny Carson show anymore, they said, it’s gone. It’s the Jay Leno show now, and you never wanted to inherit that.

Soon after, Mr. Letterman accepted the CBS show where he finally became what he wanted to be, No. 1 in late night.

Sometimes you have to realize a dream is a fixation, its object no longer achievable because it doesn’t exist.

…

Some of the [House Speaker election] spectacle connects in my mind to the fact that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a longtime idea that he must be speaker, and would do anything for it, and left his colleagues thinking eh, he just wants to be speaker—he’s two-faced, believes in little, blows with the wind. So they enjoyed torturing him. And in the end he made the kind of concessions that make a speakership hardly worth having.

This introduced an unusually white-hot Peggy Noonan column, and her no-holds barred take-down of the Freedom Caucus (“stupid,” “highly emotional,” “nihilis[ts],” no “historical depth”) is spot-on.

Remembering January 6

At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”

We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.

Peter Wehner

Hunter Biden

… The House inquiry into Hunter Biden damages him but not his father ….

One of Karl Rove’s predictions for 2023. I have no opinion on most of them, but this one’s spot on, and the obsession of the GOP Congress-in-Waiting (there is no Congress until a Speaker is elected, which hasn’t happened as I write) is contemptible.

Speaker Pelosi

I know Nancy Pelosi was (is?) almost as hated by Republicans as Hillary Clinton. In reaction, I was inclined to praise her effectiveness as Speaker of the House.

But I must admit that her effectiveness was purchased at the cost if further infantilizing our feckless Congress. Pelosi was effective at advancing Democratic goals not purely by management and persuasion. She tended to formulate massive omnibus bills in secret and then introduce them at the last minute before something dreadful like a government shutdown would arrive. Last year’s $1.7 trillion year-end bill was a classic example.

Her sobriquet probably should be “Take It or Leave It Nancy.”

And Kevin McCarthy’s complicity is why at least one House GOP member opposed him.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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