Category: Political Matters

Todd Rokita reprimanded

Good news for Hoosiers who appreciate good governance: our smarmy, showboating Attorney General, Todd Rokita, is today publicly reprimanded by the Indiana Supreme Court for disreputable extrajudicial comments.

Two dissenters thought it should be stronger than reprimand.

Downside: He’ll be deemed a martyr now and may never again lose an election in this red state.

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

David French

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

Thursday, 11/2/23

Culture

Just paying attention

As for the home-schooling pioneers who left government schools to avoid assaults on their values, they’re looking less like an ideological fringe these days and more like people who were just paying attention.

Home-school Boom – WSJ

Introverts and Extraverts

Alan Jacobs and I share a longing: Back to My Books. (It’s a short piece.)

Indeed, given a common distinction between introversion and extraversion (drained versus energized by significant time socially interacting with non-intimates), I can’t even imagine being an extravert.

Antisemite mightily resents being labeled antisemite

Suit was filed earlier this month in a New York federal district court by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan against the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center seeking $4.8 billion in damages. The suit alleges that defendants are interfering with Farrakhan’s activities through labeling him as an antisemite.

Louis Farrakhan Sues Anti-Defamation League for $4.8 Billion

ProTip for Farrakhan: If you want to file a lawsuit objecting to getting the antisemite label, it might be wise not to lard your complaint with accusations that Jews control the government.

Free to be me, a hobbyist

It’s my growing conviction that America is on a trajectory toward crack-up, but unlike my longtime muse, Rod Dreher, I’m kind of philosophical about it, believing that what follows the crack-up may be quite bearable. (I wouldn’t cheer for the crackup because I could be wrong: revolutions generally do make things worse.)

In this vein, consider Chris Arnade’s observation about the somewhat parallel calcified cultures of England and Japan:

Because of England’s calcified class structure, they know they can never be anything else, which ironically frees them up to be themselves. Which means, given they aren’t always, like Americans, trying to be more than what they currently are, they have the interest and time to pursue hobbies.

…

What about the Japanese? In Japan, while class exists (the most obvious difference is home size), it’s not nearly as stratified, or explicit as in England. The wealthy are not as, well, wealthy, or nearly as ostentatious, as they are in the rest of the developed world. At least not outwardly.

That general lack of class division—there really being nothing you can move up to that is much different from where you are now—allows the Japanese the space and time to make the best of the life they have, rather than constantly striving to be something different.

In both cases, the working and middle class Japanese and English are forced by a lack of options, to develop their own sense of self. Which includes lots of hobbies.

…

Because I respect and enjoy being around people with a well-developed sense of the self, more than I enjoy being around people with lots of stuff.

That’s also why, as much as I love the US, I find it frustrating to come back home, where we are so free to be anything, that so many of us end up being nothing.

Chris Arnade, Walking Japan: From Akashina to Fuji

Why English courses?

English courses in college are a little over a hundred years old, its having been taken for granted before then that you did not need special instruction to read poetry and novels written in your native language.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

The ever-receding leisure horizon

None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Political

Where is the Democrat mainstream on Israel?

Last week, nine Democrats voted against a House resolution condemning Hamas and backing Israel—a gauge of the extent of hard-line anti-Israel sentiment in Washington. 

“I represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” Torres told me, “whereas members like Ilhan Omar represent the fringe. I would hardly call that a divide. A divide would seem to suggest that the Democratic Party is split between the two of us. Quite the contrary. With the exception of a visible, vocal minority, just about every congressional Democrat supports Israel’s right to defend itself in the face of unprecedented terrorism.”

The Free Press

Speaker Mike Johnson (and his goofy muse)

“It’s really hard to overstate the influence that [David] Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces,” the Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Politico. “For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation.”

“What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray,” she continued. “It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.”

“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the history department at the evangelical Messiah University, told NBC News. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”

In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Among other things, he argued that Jefferson was a “conventional Christian” despite the fact that Jefferson questioned many of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of religion, said it would have been better titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a piece of historical scholarship, the book is awful,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The book was so riddled with historical inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because “basic truths just were not there.”

…

So in Speaker Johnson we have a man whose Christian worldview has led him into a hall of mirrors—historically, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law guy” who laments a lack of “absolute standards of right and wrong” was a key participant in undermining the rule of law and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has done so much to shatter absolute standards of right and wrong.

From what I can tell, Mike Johnson—unlike, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is not cynical; he seems to be a true believer, and a zealot. A polite and mild-mannered zealot, to be sure, especially by MAGA standards, but a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many of us is that he uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth. I can’t help thinking this isn’t quite what Jesus had in mind.

Peter Wehner, The Polite Zealotry of Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence in the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.

“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”

“Yet, he was chosen as speaker,” continued Burge, who is also a pastor in the American Baptist Church. “If anything, it shows us that white evangelicals still have a very strong hold on the modern Republican Party. They are losing overall market share in the larger culture, but they are certainly taking on an outsized role in Republican politics.”

Thomas B. Edsall

Another one bites the dust

Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado confirmed on Wednesday that he would not run for reelection.“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen,” the five-term congressman said in a resignation video released yesterday. “These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law.” Longtime GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who currently chairs the Appropriations Committee, also announced yesterday she would retire at the end of her term.

TMD

At least a shred

Mike Pence has ceased his campaign for the Republican nomination to the Presidency.

That’s a shame if only because he maintained at least a shred of integrity to the end:

(I’m sorry I don’t remember the source of that. I got it in July of 2022. Might the “Johnson” referenced be the new Speaker?)

Why I remain a liberal

Liberalism has always had two faces. From one side, toleration is the pursuit of an ideal form of life. From the other, it is the search for terms of peace among different ways of life. In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as applications of universal principles. In the latter, they are a means to peaceful coexistence. In the first, liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project of coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes.

John Gray via Jake Meador.

I’m a liberal of the latter kind. I cannot be a Christian Nationalist because the “Christianity” that would hold power in the USA in 2023 and for the foreseeable future would be heretical and oppressive; the very best case would be schismatic Catholic Integralists.

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.

Halloween Candies

Middle East

Jihad

It’s impossible to make a moral error when you’re a jihadist. If you die, it’s good; if your family dies, it’s good; if the infidel dies, it’s good. [Hamas] is a death cult.

Sam Harris via Andrew Sullivan.

Ceasefire = Hamas Victory

[P]rogressives calling for a cease-fire in Gaza threaten to hand Hamas the greatest victory of its existence. If Hamas can wound Israel so deeply and yet live to fight again, it will have accomplished what ISIS could not — commit acts of the most brutal terror and then survive as an intact organization against a military that possesses the power to crush it outright. I agree with Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East: Any outcome that leaves Hamas in control in Gaza “will doom not just Gaza but also much of the rest of the Middle East.”

…

it is hard to watch a large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza that kills civilians, no matter the precision of each individual strike. Much like ISIS in Mosul, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population. It is impossible to defeat Hamas without harming civilians, and each new civilian death is a profound tragedy, one that unfolds in front of a watching world. It’s a testament to our shared humanity that one of our first instincts when we see such violence is to say, “Please, just stop.”

This instinct is magnified when the combination of the fog of war and Hamas disinformation can cause exaggerated or even outright false claims of Israeli atrocities to race across the nation and the world before the full truth is known. The sheer scale of the Israeli response is difficult to grasp, and there is no way for decent people to see the death and destruction and not feel anguish for the plight of the innocent.

David French

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally rejected calls for a ceasefire. “Calls for a ceasefire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terror, to surrender to barbarism,” Netanyahu wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. “Just as the U.S. wouldn’t have agreed to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or after the terrorist attack on 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of Oct. 7.”

TMD

Order versus the Jungle

Order is a garden to be tended, but the jungle is the norm … The jungle is growing back. And we naive civilized folks, we couldn’t even start a fire without matches, much less feed or defend ourselves in the wilderness.

Damir Marusic at Wisdom of Crowds, quoting Robert Kagan.

A tacit elite bargain’s tacit limits

This item is from an October 12 column that I saved and only recently read:

The First Amendment, in its majesty, unambiguously protects the right of the best and brightest fringe-left Nazis on American college campuses to fantasize about Final Solution 2.0.

…

Nothing says “banality of evil” like having your enthusiasm for Jewish bloodletting cost you a cushy job at a white-shoe law firm.

…

Most graduates of schools like Swarthmore, UVA, NYU Law, and especially Harvard have a tacit bargain with corporate America. They get to be radically chic during their stay in the university playpen, and their future employers agree not to hold it against them provided that they leave it behind upon ascending to the very comfortable precincts of America’s professional elite. Screeching about the dispossessed can be forgiven as just another form of campus “experimentation,” but once you put on a tie and cash your paycheck, your priorities are expected to shift accordingly.

So imagine the surprise of the students who signed this week’s statements upon finding out that their bargain has an outer moral bound after all and that overt enthusiasm for war crimes crosses it. And imagine their outright shock upon realizing that “cancellation” isn’t a punishment American businesses reserve exclusively for right-wing thought criminals. Big Law, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the media industry may lean left on cultural issues, it turns out, but beheading infants is where they’re apt to get squeamish.

Which leads us to a possible bright-line rule on canceling Hamas apologists. If you’re cheering on mass murder, you’re fair game for cancellation.

…

So why do I find myself preferring—God forgive me—a balancing test instead?

Nick Cattogio, who actually has some good reasons for not categorically damning to hell every snot-nosed idiot who raises stupid and obnoxious to the Nth power.

Culture & Economics

Shrewd question

I read a NYT profile on Mike Johnson, which described the ADF as an “anti-gay rights organization.” Does the NYT refer to David French as a former employee of an “anti-gay rights organization” or would they refer to him as a former religious liberty attorney?

Hunter Baker on whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days.

Blue checks

And whatever-the-heck they’re calling it these days, the poo-bahs with blue checks are not covering themselves in glory:

According to a NewsGuard analysis, Twitter’s ‘verified’ users, who now pay to have a blue check, pushed 74% of the platform’s most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims.

(Via Dense Discovery)

Where’s my zero-hour work week?!

If we were to believe all the clichéd marketing lingo about time-saving, our lives would now consist largely of uninterrupted leisure time.

In a recent post, Brett Scott argues persuasively that, far from making our lives easier, technology is making them faster and more discombobulated. To understand how this shift happens, Scott tells us to look at the issue from a systemic perspective:

We don’t just live in any economy. We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.

Dense Discovery

Trade-offs, people. No free lunches.

Shamelessly stealing?

Masimo argues that Apple’s reputation for innovation is undeserved and that the company has made a practice of “efficient infringement” — using other companies’ technologies without permission and dealing with the legal fallout as necessary. The company points to something that Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ And we have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Peter Coy, on the successful patent infringement (Masimo’s pulse oximeter technology) case against Apple — a lawsuit that could take all but one (old) Apple Watch off the market come December 26.

Political

The antics of the contemporary GOP

Jonah Goldberg has spelled out a useful heuristic for getting one’s head around the antics of the contemporary GOP. To understand modern Republicans, he says, ask yourself: What would they do if they were trying to be a minority party? Nine times out of 10, that’s what they will do. It is as though they are trying to force moderates, “normies,” ordinary sensible people, and—if it comes to it—more or less up-and-down-the-line conservatives who just happen to have an aversion to coups to either stay on the sidelines or support Democrats.

Kevin D. Williamson

Prophetic

And so, goodbye, Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton. Au revoir, Ivanka and Jared, Uday and Qusay — there’s a table for four reserved for you at Dorsia. So long, Melania — it’s still not entirely clear what you got out of this, but I hope it was worth it. A fond farewell to Ted Cruz’s reputation and Mike Pence’s self-respect, Lindsey Graham’s manhood and Fox News’s business model. In with “Dr.” Jill Biden, out with “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

I’m sure we’ll all meet again. But I’d really rather we didn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson, Witless Ape Rides Helicopter, January 20, 2021 (emphasis added)

GOP Spam

Words cannot express how — ummmm — impressed I am at the ingenuity of the GOP (or someone pretending to be the GOP, but I doubt that, based on long experience) in coming up with a seemingly endless waves of spam email addresses to inundate me with praises of Speaker Mike Johnson, so that they can “honor” each of my reflexive unsubscribe requests without ever actually ceasing to flood my zone with shit.

Shorts

America is proof that populations can continue to “be religious” long after they have lost all conception of the sacred.

Matthew Dal Santo

Trump Says Pence Should Endorse Him After Former VP Suspends 2024 Campaign

Axios. Of course he does.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.

Joe Biden in 2012 making the case for re-electing Barack Obama (via David French)

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

David French

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

Thursday, 8/12/23

Culture

Literature versus mere words

Jon Fosse

Some insights into Nobel Literature Laureate Jon Fosse:

You don’t read my books for the plots …

Jon Fosse to the Financial Times in 2018.

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

Jon Fosse to Le Monde in 2003.

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

Damion Searls of Jon Fosse, who Searls translates.

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

The Bunkinator

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

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

Stop Reading the News

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

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

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News.

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

The present madness

Gate-crashers

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

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

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

Nellie Bowles

Triggers

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

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

(Oops!)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Rootedness and identitarianism

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Theory belied by practice

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

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

Boo-boo about BOBOs

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

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

What the happy man does

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

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Politics

Backlash

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

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

At Least You Get a Judge Out of It

At the time, I annotated her observation:

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

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

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

Effective LARPing the dark side

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

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

David French

Radioactive

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

Rod Dreher

Impenetrable Illogic

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

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

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

The Druids strike!

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

Hiatus

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

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

David French

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

Friday, 10/6/23

The Culture Generally

Ninth Commandment, RIP

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

Banned Book B.S.

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

Margaret Renkl

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

Am I wrong?

Performing malady

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

…

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

Freddie de Boer.

Not enough models available

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

Freddie de Boer

Aspirations for our children

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

Henry Adams, via David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Children? What children?

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

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Politics

Taking sides

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

Via The Morning Dispatch

Captured by false dichotomies

On a related note:

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

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

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

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

R.R. Reno

Progress against Porn

More Reno:

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

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

Cui bono?

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

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

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

Nick Cattogio

Your Guide to the New Right

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

Gerontocracy and Gaetz

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

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

Ross Douthat, How Gerontocracy Explains the Matt Gaetz Clown Show

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

Trump

Winning, but dysfunctionally

In the 2022 elections,

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

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

Predictably, that did not happen.

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

David Frum, The Republican Delusion Machine

Sir Thomas More lives!

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

Peter Wehner, The Revolution Devours Kevin McCarthy

Wordplay

Plogging

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

(H/T WSJ)

Snaffle

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

Cambridge Dictionary.

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

Remaking the World page 237.

Idyllic

Wikimedia Commons

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

bland ambition

Ross Douthat’s characterization of the fallen Speaker Kevin McCarthy

Romanticizing the past

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

David French

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

Friday 9/29/23

This is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s death. Alan Jacobs reminds me that it’s also the 50th anniversary of W.H. Auden’s death. I am twice bereaved (though I knew not Auden 50 years ago).

Migration

Orban’s Hungary

I’m not saying that Trump was all bad as president. But even the good things that Trump did were accompanied by a narcissism, a gratuitous aggression and not often with[] a lot of intellectual substance, while Orbán has got about the business of being a successful centre-right leader with a lot more grace and a lot more intellectual heft.

… governments have a duty to their own citizens to maintain the character of the country and not to have the character of the country changed forcibly by outsiders.

… no one has a right to turn up in someone else’s country and demand residency. Now, if they are immediately fleeing serious risks to their lives, yes, they can claim sanctuary. But for them to be genuine refugees, as opposed to would-be illegal migrants, they’ve got to seek sanctuary in the first available place. And the vast majority of those coming into Europe are not seeking sanctuary in the first available place. They aren’t even seeking sanctuary at all, most of them, they’re seeking a better life.

Former Australian PM Tony Abbott

EU

The problem with the migration package is its underlying philosophy; a philosophy of open borders complete with letters of invitation. The message that needs to be sent is that there is no allocation possible; please don’t come. If a country needs a workforce, it must be done through legal channels: embassies, consulates, and cooperation programmes with third countries.

The current policy of burdening countries that do not have any link, current or historical, to the third world is unfair and must stop. We were never part of those decisions, so why should we have any responsibility for it? This is a Central European and a Hungarian position. The EU has enough assets at its disposal to handle this problem, such as the financial instruments, to make agreements with countries outside the EU to stop, not to manage, migration. The attitude towards migration has to change completely. Policy makers must say: No, don’t come here. Everything else is hot air.

…

European voters must be told that economic migration is not a human right; asylum from a war zone is. A country neighboring a war zone should take in refugees, as Hungary has done with Ukraine (1.2 million asylum seekers have already been received since the start of the war). However, it is absurd, legally and morally, to make the same allowance for economic migrants who come from far away lands and have passed through many safe countries.

Judit Varga

Culture

Attempted aphorism

Up until now, we have had more questions than answers. What we’d like is more answers than questions.

A spokesperson for a group suspicious of a government proposal. (The details of the proposal and of the suspicious group aren’t really relevant, are they? The silliness of the attempted aphorism is the real point.)

“Religion” as a tool of oppression

It’s outside the usual narrative of repression by religion, but it’s possibly more pervasive: marginalizing something by assigning it to the category “religion.”

In reality, the amorphous nature of Hinduism is due to the fact that Hinduism originally included all that it means to be Indian, including what modern Westerners divided into religion, politics, economics, and so on. But if Hinduism is what it means to be Indian, then by identifying and isolating a religion called Hinduism, the British were able to marginalize what it means to be Indian. Under British colonization, to be British was to be public; to be Indian was to be private. The very conception of religion was a tool in removing native Indian culture and Indians themselves from the exercise of public power.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Artificial Intelligence is still really dumb

Thanks to Jacob Mchangama, I learned that Bing Chat and ChatGPT-4 (which use the same underlying software) refuse to answer queries that contain the words “nigger,” “faggot,” “kike,” and likely others as well. This leads to the refusal to talk about Kike Hernandez (might he have been secretly born in Scunthorpe?), but of course it also blocks queries that ask, for instance, about the origin of the word “faggot,” about reviews for my coauthor Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger, and much more. (Queries that use the version with the accent symbol, “Kiké Hernández,” do yield results, and for that matter the query “What is the origin of the slur ‘Kiké’?” explains the origin of the accent-free “kike.” But I take it that few searchers would actually include such diacritical marks in their search.)

Eugene Volokh

I’ll believe that AI is “intelligent” when it can answer serious questions about contentious topics rather than imposing a blanket ban on naughty words.

Censorship from the anti-censors

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Audre Lorde, quoted against the tactics of Christopher Rufo: Nico Perrino, Right-Wing Activist Christopher Rufo Became the One Thing He Claims to Hate

This led me to review my clippings on Rufo, who set my presumption to “distrust” when he spoke about “freezing the brand” of critical race theory and what he intended to do next. It turns out that some decent people think he’s mostly positive. I’m still not convinced. I feel like he’s a ticking time-bomb harboring some terrible secret.

Conspiracy theories

When should one believe a conspiracy theory?

The bottom line is that citizens should believe accounts from properly constituted epistemic authorities rather than theories that either (1) directly conflict with the epistemic authorities or (2) assert knowledge that has yet to be deemed authoritative by the epistemic authorities. A conspiracy theory may be true, but people are not justified in believing it until the appropriate epistemological authorities deem it true. Therefore, well-evidenced conspiracy theories may—should they reach a certain evidentiary bar—provide the grounds for investigation, appeal, and reassessment, but they should not be believed outright.

Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in American Conspiracy Theories (2014), quoted by Paul Christmann, The Monster Discloses Himself, 25.1 Hedgehog Review.

This would work great if only conspiracy theories didn’t so often start with axiomatic distrust of “properly constituted epistemic authorities.”

A specific conspiracy theory

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on Friday accused the Department of Justice of trying to cover up its biases by indicting a Democratic senator.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on federal bribery charges Friday. The indictment accuses Menendez and his wife of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and “luxury vehicle and home furnishings.”

But rather than accept the indictment shows that the Justice Department is actually a neutral entity, Kirk unveiled some convoluted logic to supposedly prove his original belief.

“The way that the fourth branch of government operates is with intentionality. There are no mistakes,” he said on his podcast.

“They’re doing this to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.”

Tori Otten, Right-Wingers Already Have a Wild Conspiracy Theory About Senator Menendez

I note that despite multiple Right-Wingers in the headline, Otten only cited the hack Charlie Kirk, good enough to affiliate with Liberty University but compared to whom Christopher Rufo is a Nobel Laureate.

Preening propagandists

danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list boyd links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why boyd can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored.

…

I sometimes wonder whether this kerfuffle isn’t something of a smokescreen, intended to distract our attention from more serious and troubling attempts at what George Orwell called “the prevention of literature” … You can buy books that some parents have protested; you can’t buy books that, because of political pressure, have never seen the light of day ….

Alan Jacobs

On the supposed superiority of empathy versus sympathy

Etymologically speaking, sympathy was here first. In use since the 16th century, when the Greek syn- (with) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries. Empathy (the “em” means “into”) barged in from the German in the 20th century and gained popularity through its usage in fields like philosophy, aesthetics and psychology. According to my benighted 1989 edition of Webster’s Unabridged, empathy was the more self-centered emotion, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.”

But in more updated lexicons, it’s as if the two words had reversed. Sympathy now implies a hierarchy whereas empathy is the more egalitarian sentiment. Empathy, per Dictionary.com, is “the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts or attitudes of another” while sympathy stands at a haughty, “you poor dear” remove: “the act or state of feeling sorrow or compassion for another.”

…

Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.

Pamela Paul, Have Some Sympathy

Imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a formidable revanchist.

I’ve found that reminding myself that other people also experience imposter syndrome has never been comforting or at all helpful.

Instead, the closest I’ve come to a “cure” is by taking the spotlight off me and trying to focus on the work. This isn’t about who I am, but about something I’m doing. I tell myself: Okay fine, maybe I am a fraud, but the work is real. I have an index card pinned to the wall that says, “The work speaks for itself.”

Robert van Vliet on micro.blog as @rnv.

Domestic Politics

DJT, MoF

What do we mean exactly by “person of faith”? Trump has had a few very good polls this week, and one deeply perplexing one. The majority of Republican voters see Donald J. Trump as a “person of faith,” according to a poll by HarrisX for the Deseret News. In fact, they see him as more religious than Mitt Romney, who definitely wears the Mormon underwear, and Mike Pence, whose faith is so strong it disallows him from looking female baristas in the eye. Trump. . . more faithful. . . than Mitt Romney and Mike Pence. I don’t even mean this as a pro-Pence take (sick), since for me personally, the one thing I like about Trump is how absolutely godless he is. My walnut-sized brain simply cannot grok the idea of Trump as your top Republican of faith. If Trump’s a man of faith, I am a pastor. My only takeaway is that I am deeply, criminally out of touch with Evangelical America. 

Nellie Bowles (or one of her acknowledged helpers)

I was going to comment on this myself, but Bowles beat me to it with something more adequate than “WTF?!” Is this not a genuine proof that much American religion is nuts?

Strive to resist numbness

Some percentage of you surely rolled your eyes when you realized what this newsletter would be about. Another Trump column?

Strive to resist numbness. Because despite all the blather about Biden and Trump being the two most known “known quantities” in politics, we actually don’t know how dangerous and destabilizing Trump might prove to be as his mind bends under the strain of an election and four indictments. Or whether it’ll break entirely once he’s back in power and surrounded by the most obsequious fascist toadies he can find.

I think he’s getting worse.

Nick Cattagio

Intellectuals and Officeholders

This points, I think, to a certain unreality on the American right. The intellectuals (or at least some of them) are nuanced in their thinking, humane in their sensibilities, keen to avoid cruelty and alleviate suffering, and willing to use government (at least sometimes) to attain that end. But the party’s officeholders and the rank-and-file voters who put them there are prone to extremism, indifferent to (and sometimes appear actively to delight in) cruelty and suffering, and unwilling to use government to make anyone’s life any easier.

…

The fact is that GOP voters chose Trump—and they keep choosing him. They liked his coarseness and selfishness, his rage and fear, and his demands for personal fealty and deference. It’s therefore more accurate to say that his own exemplification and affirmation of these qualities have given Republican voters permission to exemplify and affirm these pre-existing qualities in themselves. Trump lets them off the hook. Instead of Michelle Obama exhorting them to go high when their political opponents go low, Trump assures Republican voters that the smart thing (the guarantor of political victory) is always to go as low as possible—which means indulging a temptation toward viciousness that was already there.

This has had the effect of transforming expressions of callousness and aversion to charity from selectively indulged vices into demonstrations of virtue widely admired for their toughness and ruthlessness.

Damon Linker, The Agony of the Pro-Life Intellectual

As I have noted repeatedly, I mentally checked out of the GOP (my state doesn’t register voters by party) in January 2005, but not because I found the party coarse and selfish. I began to suspect that something was more deeply wrong only during Obama administration, when Republican obsessions with bullshit like birth certificates made me suspect racism more overt than I had thought still existed. Then Trump blew the whole thing open when he moved from Birther-in-Chief to Commander-in-Chief.

As I also have noted (or at least implied) repeatedly, I haven’t checked into the Democrat party. My weak and notional party affiliation is with the American Solidarity Party.

And if you think affiliation with a third party is foolish, I’ll note that it’s no more foolish than expecting either of our major parties to embody the values that lead me to the ASP.

If out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, then if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.

L. M. Sacasas, Embrace Your Crookedness

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

Monday, 9/25/23

Culture generally

Living with Autism

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

Jesse Singal.

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

Compelling governmental interests

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

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

Nellie on the 15th

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

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

…

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

…

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

Nellie Bowles

Miscellany

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

Via Andrew Sullivan

What humanity as a whole needs

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

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

In case you were wondering,

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

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

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

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

Pop starlets

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

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

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

Self-refuting

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

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

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

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

Caution

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

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Slowing Down

Liturgy of the Mall

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

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

Necessity is the mother

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

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

Maybe lack of principles isn’t all bad …

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

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Sexual Revolution

How do you measure success?

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

…

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

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

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

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

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

(via Rod Dreher)

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

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

Children’s happiness, adult freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Rod Dreher, Sex, Freedom, Happiness

Poco Politics

Denizens of Delusionland

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

…

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

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

Gender vs. Sex

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

Sheluyang Peng, Immigration is religion’s only hope.

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

Why such a hack?

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

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

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

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

David French

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

Thursday, 9/14/23

Culture

Building new kinds of stability

In a world where absolutely everything is unstable, from geopolitics to money and even the climate, some far-sighted younger millennials and Gen Z-ers are already pioneering a new model. Willow, a twenty-five-year-old writer based in rural Canada, married at twenty-three and is cocreating a domestic economy with her husband, Phil, one that is clearly an update of the premodern “productive household.” In addition to her writing projects, she does carpentry with Phil, roughly dividing the work into “first fix” (which requires more strength, and which Phil does) and finishing (which requires more patience and manual dexterity, at which Willow excels). Because they have a small baby, Willow cannot do much carpentry at present, but she is active in finding Phil clients and sometimes apprentices. Willow also tends a small farm on her and Phil’s property.

From an industrial-feminist perspective, Willow’s approach is unacceptably in thrall to patriarchy: She married young, views childcare as largely her domain, and is not the main money earner. Yet Willow is sincerely pursuing her interests as an embodied woman, in her relational context, rather than as an atomized, abstract “human” in an inconveniently female body.

Mary Harrington, Is There Hope for Marriage?

Thought about poetry

Free verse was all the rage at the time, with the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg also experimenting with the same pharmaceuticals and literary devices. Personally, I remain uncertain about the value of these creative detours. Poetry is meant to be the most distilled way to communicate. Does anyone think Ginsberg and the other Beats were able to distill their thought, or even put their fingers on it? To me, those fellows slowed thought down.

Constraints in poetry do a number of things. They discipline the writer—no small thing. They help the reader, and also, the rememberer. 

It is hard to memorize chunks of free verse, just as it is hard to remember large chunks of prose. There is a reason that almost nobody can say, “Do you know my favorite paragraph from my favorite novel?”—and then recite it.

Douglas Murray

Those grimy white cliffs

Chaplins Restaurant and Carvery in Dover, despite all the visible unhappiness is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying Jon, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through.

Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community built around a shared history and culture. Even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters.

That’s essential, and at a deep level Wall Street me didn’t understand. The English know who they are, and are ok with it.

Chris Arnade, Walking England’s Coast Part 1: From Dover to New Romney

Confusing comfort for civilization

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, British statesman, Conservative politician, writer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, via Life on Dover Beach

AI in medicine

AI without the ballast of intuition represents the tyranny of pure analysis. Unleashed, and without intuition to give it a more profound understanding of humanity, AI stands ready to extend the power of reductive and often dangerously misleading concepts.

Ronald W. Dworkin, Paging Dr. Bot

Subscribing to flatness

Most consumers don’t know that by using internet-based (or -generated) platforms—by buying from Amazon, by staying in an Airbnb, by ordering on Grubhub, by friending people on Facebook—that they are subscribing to a life of flatness, one that can lead directly into certain politics. But they are. Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives. It is not an accident that progressive ideas spread faster on the internet. The internet is a car that runs on flatness; progressive politics—unlike either conservatism or liberalism—are flatness.

Alana Newhouse, Everything Is Broken

Gut-punch

There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

“It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.

Louise Perry, We Are Repaganizing

Inflation and privilege

Both being retired persons now, my wife and I are taking our annual week in Traverse City, Michigan next week rather than June, as we used to. A friend who we’ll join up there gives a scouting report that our breakfast favorite (French Omelettes) is closed; they couldn’t afford to pay what staff needed to earn in a quite expensive city.

I peeked at the online menu of a surviving “fine dining” restaurant; this is going to be a fairly expensive vacation. That I can afford it is a privilege. That servers, cooks, busboys, dishwashers and such cannot means that my deliberately high level of tipping hasn’t been enough to make those jobs attractive.

Politics

Social imperialism

Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) sends out weekly missives detailing the machinations of activists at the UN to get abortion and LGBT-supporting language in treaties and formal documents of every kind; Marguerite Peeters described the phenomenon of how institutions were infiltrated and colonized in The Globalization of the Western Sexual Revolution (2012); sociologist Gabrielle Kuby did the same in The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

…

Nigerian human rights activist Obianuju Ekeocha described what the West has been perpetrating on Africa in her essential 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism in the Twenty-First Century as well as the 2019 documentary Strings Attached. So-called humanitarian aid, she writes, nearly always comes with strings attached—contraceptives, demands for the legalization of abortion, perverse Western-style sex education, and the replacement of traditional African values with post-modern Western ones. The desperate need of many African countries for Western foreign aid is exploited to push for the imposition of a top-down sexual revolution.
 
…

But the Guardian would have us believe that a few Christian groups are imposing their views on unwilling African populations, and that this is also serving as a testing ground for laws in Hungary and American red states. The brazenness of this level of gaslighting is almost impressive—but it needs to be called out. The truth is that rich Western countries are pushing the LGBT agenda and abortion in developing countries, promising them cash in exchange for their souls—but you won’t read that in the mainstream press.

Jonathon Van Maren, The Left’s Colonial Mission (The European Conservative)

As someone said, if a third-world country asks for a bridge, China will build them a bridge; the US will force some aspect of the sexual revolution on them and only then build a bridge.

Who do you think wins more hearts?

Newly-conservative?

Our unabashed dictionary calls a conservative a liberal who’s been mugged:

  • “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department. If you’re still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you,” – Shivanthi Sathanandan, Minnesota DFL’s Second Vice Chair, in June 2020.
  • “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS,” – Sathanandan, this week, after being violently car-jacked and beaten bloody in front of her children in Minneapolis.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

What if Biden bowed out?

More from Sullivan (see Newly-Conservative, above), begging Biden to bow out of POTUS24:

A new candidate would immediately shift the dynamic of the race. The Democrat would represent the future; and Trump the polarized past. A younger candidate would instantly reverse the age argument in the Democrats’ favor. The news cycles would be full of Dem debates, fights, campaigns and energy — and not dictated by the defensive torpor of a frail octogenarian, or the unending narrative of Trump against the corrupt elites.

…

Biden was elected as a means to check Trump; the logic of his presidency was always that the old man would get us back to normal; and that argument makes much more sense for a one-term presidency … there could be no worse legacy than handing the country back to the monster you rescued us from.

I agree. Trump’s secret weapon, maybe his margin of victory, is Biden’s manifest infirmity.

But any other Democrat is likely to be even more extreme on sexuality.

Superiority

Democrats who indulge in hubris are liable to assume and sometimes proclaim their innate superiority through their education or their modern morality. Republicans do it by exalting two particular types as superior: the businessman and the pious man.

Henry Olsen, The Three Deadly Sins of the Right (American Compass)

You’re not likely to get American Compass quotes here very often, but this seemed accurate and illuminating.

My problem with Theocracy

[I]n the Christian nation that Wilson and his allies want to bring about, there wouldn’t be much space for Christians like me to operate. He told the Washington Post that

while leaders would strive to ‘maximize religious liberty for everyone,’ Catholics are unlikely to feel welcome — ‘I think it has to be a pan-Protestant project,’ he said — nor would Christians who disagree with his stridently patriarchal social norms. … Asked to explain where liberal Christians fit into his theoretical Christian society, Wilson said they would be excluded from holding office, later noting similar prohibitions in early American Colonial settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When it was pointed out that Puritans executed Boston Quakers, Wilson said he would not “defend” the hanging of Quakers, but then argued it was important to understand the context of the time.

It’s gonna be fun to watch these old boys and the Catholic integralists go at each other, if either side can tear themselves away from their keyboards long enough to find their way to the field of battle.

Rod Dreher. That neither Douglas Wilson nor the Catholic Integralists have in mind a world hospitable to Orthodoxy keeps me at arms’-length from them. If I cared to, I could probably impugn their ability to govern wisely even by their own lights.

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

David French

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

Sunday, 9/10/23

War by other means

In a conversation with a young friend, I was told that politics is the only way to get anything done. This is not true.

Politics — that is, the use of civil power — is a means to gain the upper hand in a Hobbesian struggle. It is war, fought by other means.

It is for that reason that politics is a questionable activity for Christians. The victories achieved are often brief and, depending on the opposition, only maintained by the continued use of force.

It is profoundly the case that civil or military force are not the tools of the Kingdom of God. It is among the many reasons that the Kingdom of God is not, and never can be, a human project.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Peaceable Kingdom in a World at War

The best reason yet to kick the news and opinion addiction.

Where did the schadenfreude go?

There’s something wrong with me (or is it “right with me”?). I waded into Kevin D. Williamson’s High Plains Grifter to wallow in schadenfreude at the self-inflicted wounds of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s about to get his comeuppance.

But I didn’t feel it. The schadenfreude wasn’t there, even though a corrupt top law enforcement officer is particularly odious.

What I felt was that Texas needs to remove this cancer from public office and the cancer needs to spend the rest of his life in repentance — as do we all.

TEC

[T]he Episcopal Church across centuries served as America’s religious finishing school, educating our leaders, and providing liturgies for our national life.

Mark Tooley

For most of my life, I operated an analytical view toward churches’ doctrines, and the waffling of the Episcopalians vexed me sorely. In recent years, they’ve vexed me by waffling on human sexuality.

But I’ve also come to appreciate the beauty of Anglican worship. I’m glad some of our solemn national moments are enacted or remembered in the National Cathedral in DC, and are done with Anglican dignity. Gone is my youthful contempt for civil religion.

I also no longer shake my head in bafflement when some doctrinally conservative sort leaves Evangelicalism for the ECUSA. It may be less than ideal (or may not), but I don’t doubt that the dignified Episcopal service is more nourishing than the gimmickry of many Evangelical Churches.

(But what do I know about typical Evangelical Churches today? I barely pay attention to the televised ones, and they’re probably not typical.)

Creative investigations of decency, virtue, and goodness

How many more novels, TV shows, and movies do we need exploring yet another flavor of badness, charting yet another journey of self-destruction, physical or moral or both? It’s like … yeah, I get it! This kind of work might have been revelatory once; that time has passed. Too often (and here I’ll get extra-ornery) the creative cover story that goes “I’m interested in these deeply flawed characters … I like writing about broken people” is simply an excuse to revel in depictions of violence — physical or moral or both.

I believe it is time, instead, for creative investigations of decency, virtue, and goodness. If that sounds boring: yes! That’s why the project is needed! Let’s learn how to render complex and compelling the characters who are trying their best to live correctly — and sometimes, gasp, even succeeding.

Robin Sloan

I’ve newly subscribed to Robin Sloan’s newsletter on the concurring praise of several cyber-friends. His point here is solid — but not exactly original. It’s a notorious fact that it’s much harder for a writer to create a compelling portrayal of goodness than a compelling portrayal of evil. Why that should be so is above my pay grade.

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

David French

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

Wednesday, 8/30/23

Culture

Industrialism

It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Who thinks learning is the point of university?

[I]n the American university system the vast expansion of DEI apparat simply follows the previous (and not yet complete) expansion of the mental-health apparat, all of which siphons resources away from the teaching of students. But that’s okay, because almost no one — least of all students and their parents — thinks that learning is the point of university. The university is for socialization, networking, and credentialing, and I expect to see a continuing expansion of the bureaucracies that promote these imperatives and a corresponding contraction of the number of teachers. And anyway, insofar as teaching and learning remain a burdensome necessity, if an annoying one, much of that work can be outsourced to ed-teach products and, now, to chatbots. 

Genuine teaching and genuine learning will always go on, but for the foreseeable future it will happen at the margins of our universities or outside the universities altogether. Meanwhile, the symbolic work of the party-state will grind on ….

Alan Jacobs

… that all men are created equal …

This meant bringing together supporters and opponents of slavery. (Not free and slave states: in 1776, every state recognized slavery. The Betsy Ross flag shows us thirteen stars in a circle, and every star represents a slave state.) Some of the colonists disliked slavery; others were very attached to it. In consequence, the Declaration adopts a political theory that has no direct implications for slavery: it is about the rights of insiders and focused on the question of when the governed may reject the legitimate political authority of their governors.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

1619 Project versus the Standard Story

What the 1619 Project is, really, is the extreme progressive version of the standard story: it tells us that we have fallen further short of our ideals, more frequently, more consistently, and more deliberately than we realize. Yet it still tells us that “our founding ideals” were written in 1776—and it is still a profession of faith in them, of faith in an America we can work to perfect.

Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was

Protesters and vigilantes

From Tuesday more motorists must pay to drive in London. The Ultra-Low Emissions Zone—in which a surcharge applies to high-polluting vehicles—will be expanded to all 32 boroughs of Britain’s capital. The £12.50 ($15.75) daily levy will cover diesel cars and vans that do not meet “Euro 6” standards (typically those bought before 2015), and cars that don’t meet “Euro 4” (which typically predate 2006). A scrappage scheme has been introduced to help owners of non-compliant cars buy greener vehicles.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, a member of the Labour Party, argues that the move will improve health, especially of children. But it has provoked a fierce backlash, particularly among drivers who live in peripheral parts of the city. That has been seized upon by Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, which has had a hard time winning votes in London in recent years. The party is now portraying Labour as anti-driver. Some vigilantes have vandalised the cameras used to enforce the clean-air scheme.

The Economist’s World in Brief 8/29/23. A thousand takes on this story could be, and probably are being, written. I noted it for the trajectory of western governments and to note that another publication might have used “protesters” where the Economist chose “vigilantes.” After all, it’s “mostly peaceful,” isn’t it?

Travel

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

Dagobert D. Runes. But God help me, I love it anyway.

Legalia

No-fault divorce

Professor Lynn Wardle has shown that the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution approach to fault has serious inconsistencies. If one party squanders family wealth, this fact can be considered in the property settlement, almost like an “economic fault.” Allegations of assault, battery, or abuse of the children can be handled as criminal acts.

So, if the ALI’s Principles still effectively permit the consideration of economic faults and abuse faults, what does no-fault amount to? It means that the major fault removed by “no-fault” was adultery or sexual infidelity.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

(I gritted and ground my teeth through this book not because of its substance but because of a style I found grating. Caveat emptor.)

Tortious spam filters?

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Calabretta granted Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming the company’s Gmail spam filter unfairly suppressed RNC messages. “While it is a close case,” the judge wrote, “the court concludes that … the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC’s messages into Gmail users’ spam folders, and that doing so was protected by section 230.” As Sarah wrote last year, Republican fundraising appeals are likely flagged by spam filters at higher rates due to abuse of email lists.

The Morning Dispatch

Sobering statistic

The prison population roughly doubled during Reagan’s years in office, from 329,000 Americans in jail in 1980 to 627,000 in 1988. This trend accelerated during the Bush and Clinton presidencies. By 2008, there were 1.6 million people in American prisons, with the US leading the world in total prison population and imprisonment rate.

Jon Ward, Testimony. That should be enough to make anyone think twice, two or three times, about how “free” we really are.

Politics

What is this “white trash”?

Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury (I have not read this book but ran across this quote anyway.)

Manly men

[Ted] Cruz is one of the many singing the totally-normal-and-not-at-all-weirdly-homoerotic praises of Donald Trump’s recent Fulton County Jail mugshot: “Trump’s mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo. It’s going viral, and it’s making a heck of a statement.” Jesse Watters of Fox News, affirming his “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” said of Trump: “He looks good and he looks hard.”

In reality, Trump looks like the Grinch after a makeover performed by John Wayne Gacy—I’d love to know what the last man booked into that jail while wearing that much makeup was charged with, and I’ll bet it was hilarious—but it is of interest to me what these guys with their unblemished records of heterosexuality think looks and seems tough. Donald Trump is a guy who has never lifted anything heavier than money and blasts Broadway show tunes and the Village People at his rallies for totally normal people who are by no means members of a cult. I don’t know how much time you can spend dancing to “Macho Man” before your record of heterosexuality gets a blemish, or at least a footnote. And then there’s the inevitable playing of the music from Cats.

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson doesn’t have much use for Mike Pence, either (same column, titled The Whited Sepulcher. Ouch!).

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

R.R. Reno

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

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