Category: Russia

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

The Say Hey Kid was that rarity who played a boy’s game with a boy’s joy and a man’s discipline and shrewdness.

National Review, The Week. That’s got to be the best “in a nutshell” on Mays. One consolation of being 75 most of this year is the memory of Willie Mays playing live, not just on highlight reels. You kids have no idea ….

Even the secularists have rituals

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

I became an “Apple guy” at home before retirement, though I still had to use Windows at work. Now our house is all Apple (or nearly so). (I confess to brief side-eyed looks at Linux, but it’s never stuck; I’ve just got my Apple gear set up to do what I want, quickly, so why change?)

Still, VisionPro was a bridge or two too far — way too much money for a novelty. Now:

Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025. (Source: theinformation.com)

Via John Ellis

Freud

In his fanciful narrative, religion and the civilization that springs from it are reducible to a primordial event of psychosexual violence. … For Freud, at the dawn of human civilization a group of brothers, desiring sexual gratification with their mother, spontaneously rise up against their father and commit parricide. They then devour his body in a ritual act, joining incest to cannibalism. Because of their guilt, however, they internalize their absent father’s authority, which takes the place of a collective superego. From that moment on, human civilization has worked to suppress the libidinal will to power in men by repressing desire and transferring it to more “sublimated” activities. All religions—but especially Christianity with its doctrine of God the Father—are compensations for this primordial act of parricide. They can all be traced back to this scientifically formulated (and completely theoretical) act of original sin.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

His polemical broadsides vaulted him to the forefront of a group of revisionist skeptics loosely known as the Freud bashers.

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

Obituary for Frederick Crews: “A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.”

It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materially discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

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

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

Recent dustups over the supposedly racist implications of advocating marriage, thrift, and a good work ethic reveal the logic of cultural deregulation. The goal is to strip society of norms, leaving unsheltered those who cannot afford to live in well-appointed enclaves that covertly sustain modified bourgeois norms for the rich and their children. In the open culture, the lives of ordinary people become more disordered and less functional.

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

[I]t has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”

…

[U]nlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.

…

[I]t’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

So it is that the gendered nature of the body is under attack, from the Left and Right, as is the connection between sex and babies. Left and Right alike resent the limitations of the human body. There’s just one small problem: sex does make babies and men and women are different. An ideology that cannot make room for the basic facts of human reproduction and sex differences is an ideology that will end up at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race. In that war, it will go looking for allies where it can find them. It finds its most powerful, its indispensable, ally in the State.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

By quoting, I’m not endorsing this book. I read it in preparation for a Symposium where the author was to be one of three keynote speakers. Based partly on the book, which did make a few points in a temperate register, I decided not to register for the symposium.

Self-delegitimation

As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

WordPress unfortunately has been “improving” things again, so I cannot figure out how to embed a YouTube video, but I recommend the video at this link.

Theory 1: Putin is a revanchist, with many screws loose, who wants to rebuild the USSR in toto.
Theory 2: Putin would not tolerate NATO being extended to its very border with Ukraine (which the US promised it would not allow), kinda like our Monroe Doctrine.

Expats

“I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

…

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come ….

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

One thing I think we can rule out right away is that the drop in support for same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality is a function of religion. I’m aware of no evidence that the United States is undergoing a religious Great Awakening, at least when it comes institutional forms of worship handed down from the past. As sociologist Samuel Perry recently put it in a useful summary for Time magazine:

According to data from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.

Why, then, might Republicans have begun turning against same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality in the past two years?

This is just speculation, but I’d wager it has something to do with the way left-wing activists have taken up the cause of transgender rights as the next front in the now-decades-long cultural revolution. To be clear: I don’t think such a backlash, if there’s been one, has arisen over calls to protect the civil rights of the tiny number of transgender people in the country. Rather, the backlash would come from opposition to the ideology of transgenderism promulgated by the most militant activists on the left—and the extraordinary rapidity with which that ideology’s assumptions and assertions have come to be treated as conventional wisdom among many of those who run government bureaucracies, public and private schools and universities, medical institutions, and the business sector.

…

If I’m right that declining support for same-sex marriage and homosexual acceptance among Republicans derives (at least in part) from a backlash against transgender activism, that would likely mean that more conservative-minded Americans have concluded the gay-rights movement was a Trojan Horse for something far more extreme and destabilizing. It’s not inevitable that they would conclude this, since as Andrew Sullivan and other champions of gay rights have persuasively argued, the interests of homosexuals stand in considerable tension with those asserted by the most radical transgender activists. But the Activist and Donor Complex on the left has made it natural for the rest of the country to make the leap from one to the other by bundling the two movements together in an ever-expanding, alphabet-soup abbreviation: LGBTTTIQA+, etc.

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

…

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

…

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. It changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to “Hatewatch,” and began issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC’s blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don’t exist, or are harmless (such as a Confederate memorabilia shop that made the list), or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC’s lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson … The SPLC’s appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million.

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

I personally know progressives who are absolutely furious that GOP figures don’t speak out against Trump, but those same individuals are petrified of the intolerant elements of their own political tribe. They wouldn’t dream of speaking against the most-woke elements of the radical left. After all, their jobs are at stake. Their reputations hang in the balance. Remember the now-famous Vox essay, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”? I’ve heard that sentiment many times.

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

If the sudden prospect of electing the first president who is a convicted felon hasn’t put Americans off Trump, why would Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, or anyone else think that reminding them of his coup plot and the insurrection it led to will do so?

On the other hand, how can one run against Donald Trump and not make his authoritarian ambitions the centerpiece of the campaign? He’s not shy about expressing those ambitions; should he win in November, the next four years will in fact be defined by his attempts to subvert the constitutional order. The right’s hostility to Western liberalism is the elephant in the room of this election. How can the president resist making a spectacle of it?

I think his and Donilon’s strategy of making the race about democracy is simultaneously weak and quite possibly the strongest one available to them.

…

There’s another case for the Donilon strategy. Namely, it’s worked before. And I don’t just mean in 2020.

Five days before the 2022 midterms Biden delivered a speech warning Americans that, with so many Trump-backed post-liberal populist Republicans running for major offices, “democracy is on the ballot.” He called on voters to ask themselves this question when considering a candidate: “Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?”

Some pundits called the address “head-scratching” in light of polling that showed the economy, not democracy, dominating when voters were asked what the most important issue in the election was. Yet five days later Republicans ended up underperforming badly in a midterm in which the out-party typically cleans up. One Trump-endorsed MAGA acolyte after another fell short in key races, holding the GOP to modest gains in the House and helping Democrats gain a seat in the Senate.

…

For me, the great virtue of the Donilon strategy is that it’ll leave America with no excuses if Trump wins. An election framed around the economy or immigration that ends in Republican victory will let denialists about the country’s decline insist that things would have been different if only Biden had taken a different approach. “He should have emphasized the coup attempt and January 6,” they’ll say. “Surely Americans wouldn’t have reelected Trump if the election had been about that.”

I’m not sure of that at all, personally. I’d like to test the proposition. And if Trump is returned to power, I’d find comfort in knowing that we maximized our collective shame by approaching the race as a referendum on the constitutional order—and chose the other option. If we do this, let’s be clear-eyed about it. No excuses. Trump 2024: Maximum Shame.

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Frank Bruni

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in.

Populism anticipated

For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court: 

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

Australia can have him

Julian Assange on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Jim Ellis, News Items

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

June!

Culture

Summertime wordplay

[I]n The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, James Lileks described the “glorious boredom” of a child’s summer with its “endlessly attenuated twilight, as the sun slides down like a hot coin and starts up the jukebox of crickets and frogs.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis)

(Via Frank Bruni)

The fate of the humanities

There’s no shortage of voices lamenting the state of the humanities, or at least of humanities departments. I was going to compile some samples, but if you’re interested, you’re already aware of them.

Are they wrong? Are the humanities actually at a new dawn?

The math nerds built our world, from the apps we use to get to work to the way we order our toilet paper. But with the rise of AI, are the coders set to become victims of their own success? Peter Thiel thinks so. In a recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, the PayPal co-founder predicted that the new technology would be “worse for the math people than for the word people.” What use is spending four years learning how to code when AI can do it all for you? 

The author Luke Burgis, echoing Thiel, predicts a “bull market in the humanities.” As he put it in a recent post on his Substack, “the humanities, rightly understood, are things that technology cannot take away or substitute for.” By the humanities, Burgis doesn’t mean the “ideological programs of cultural change” at elite universities. He means the humanities broadly understood as the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, and arts that explores “what it truly means to be human.” 

We may be in the middle of a technological revolution, but paradoxically, what’s timeless and ancient might be more valuable than what’s timely and modern.

The Free Press

From a somewhat different perspective:

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

…

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

Brad East

Sportsball

[M]uch of the modern sports world has lost its luster for me.

The era is long gone when the lineups of professional teams had enough year-to-year continuity that one knew all the players’ names and stats. But the rotation in and out of teams, including now in college sports, has become such a blur that only TV commentators afflicted with hyperfocus can keep track.

Sure, money-ball’s metrics rule, but the reality remains that now you’re mostly rooting for mercenaries. And as cable TV fades, pro and college sports teams are disappearing into the permanent fog called streaming. Looking for the airtime of your favorite team can turn into a constant and costly snipe hunt. Is it worth it?

Daniel Henninger

Tap-dancing around the “W” word

Whether and when someone with a uterus gets their period — for the first time, and throughout their life — can reflect not only their reproductive health, but their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, miscarriage, and premature death ….

STAT, H/T John Ellis

Let’s see now. Slightly more than half the human race comes equipped with a uterus. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a word for them less kludgy than “persons with uteruses” or the equivalent?

I wish they’d stop doing this

To journalists, this is a lazy visual for “this is a story about something-or-other related to Russia.”

To this American Orthodox Christian, it insinuates “Russian Orthodoxy is up to something sinister again.”

I object!

MAGA flag

Nobody knew the flag was MAGA until Justice Alito flew it. Justice Alito, however, should have known it was evil, so the argument goes, since by flying it he made it evil. Okay, well. Commenters, please add what else Justice Alito needs to endorse so that it can become shameful, and if you agree that he should start with the term fur baby. As for the other Alito flag controversy, the upside-down American flag, turns out The Washington Post saw that when it was briefly flying in 2021 and decided not to report on it since it wasn’t really a story, but now that the election’s coming up, everyone’s going through their diaries.

Nellie Bowles

Unplanned unparenthood

The obvious reasons for postponing or forgoing parenthood, such as lack of money or building a career, no doubt play a part. But another, more welcome, trend is also evident. Breaking the data down by age shows that fertility is in serious decline only among America’s youngest women. Since the 1990s the fertility rate for those aged between 15 and 19 has fallen by 77%; that for 20- to 24-year olds is down by 48%. Meanwhile, it is slowly increasing for women aged 30 and over (see charts). In 1990 teenage pregnancies accounted for one in eight births. By 2022 this had fallen to one in 25.

The Economist

Politics

Vice-signaling

“Vice-signaling.” Surely I’ve heard it before, but Michelle Goldberg brought it back as the overall branding of today’s GOP. (Killing Dogs. Taunting the Homeless. Praising Al Capone. This Is Trump’s Party.) To that list we can ad “voting for convicted felons if they’re really brazen about it.”

Speaking of which:

The blasphemy of the radical left is to deny human depravity; the radical right’s blasphemy is to enshrine this depravity as noble.

Matthew Beringer

Choosing

Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character,” the piece concluded. “Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this November’s election day.”

There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other one—usually because we find “our guy” a less than optimal choice but “the other guy” strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing “our side” will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.

The last eight years have made me more certain I was right.

Matthew J. Franck, Choosing Not to Choose

“Choosing Not to Choose” is the title of a new piece by Matthew Franck published today on the site. Trump is wholly unfit for office, Franck allows, but so is Biden for different reasons. And it’s important that Americans not vote for a political candidate they believe is unfit, as one’s vote inevitably influences one’s character. Invest in a corrupt political cause on lesser-of-two-evils grounds and eventually, by feeling obliged to defend it and perhaps embrace it, you too will be corrupted.

…

My dispute with Franck is simple. I disagree with how he’s framed the choice before voters.

The question isn’t “Biden or Trump?” so much as it’s “Should we continue with the constitutional order as we’ve known it or try something radically different?”

I’ll guarantee here and now that if Trump becomes president again and remains in good health he’ll try to extend his term in office past 2029. I won’t guarantee that he’ll succeed, but the attempt will be made as surely as you’re reading this. Trump is less a person than a personality type and his type is compelled to pursue its own interests remorselessly above all things. I think he’d honestly find it hard to comprehend why someone in his position shouldn’t try to extend their time in power.

Biden won’t do that if reelected. (And not just because he might be catatonic by 2029.) He won’t defy court orders. He won’t stock the leadership of the Justice Department with fanatics who have sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally. He won’t call the military out into the streets to confront people protesting him. And, contra Franck, I don’t believe he’ll claim a “mandate” if he wins, since he’s all but certain to do so with fewer electoral votes than he received in 2020 and with a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Nick Cattogio, Choosing to Choose

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Culture

Made Men

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perennial favorite for the internet age

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

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Another oldie

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

William F. Buckley via Douglas Murray

New Illustration for the Urban Dictionary

Cringe: It’s like this.

(H/T Nellie Bowles)

Owning the full weight of your worldview

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

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

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

Good Dad

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

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

Ruso-Ukraine war and NATO

Be it remembered:

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

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

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

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

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

Campus Protests

Coddled2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radical Revolutionaries on the cheap

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

Nellie Bowles.

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

Forewarding illiberalism

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

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

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

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

…

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

Andrew Sullivan

Politics

Life in the Stupid Party

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

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

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

Meanwhile, over at the Evil Party

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

Matt Taibbi via James Howard Kunstler

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Jumping the gun?

I know it’s not Saturday yet, but Saturday-Sunday blogging was never my official policy.

Meta-Politics

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power

What the political parties have become

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election,” declared Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, as she conceded the New Hampshire primary to Mr Trump on January 23rd. She may be right in theory. But she is wrong in practice that there is some coherent entity called a “party” capable of such a rational calculation. As Mr Trump demonstrated in 2016, and Barack Obama did before him, political parties do not plot or strategise anymore to anoint a candidate, at least not with much effect; they have instead become vehicles idling by the curbs of American life until the primaries approach, waiting for successful candidates to commandeer them.

The Economist

2000 Jackasses

This is quite a rout:

True the Vote, an activist group that claimed that ballot stuffing in Georgia rigged the 2020 election and the January 2021 senate runoff, admitted in court filings released last week that it lacked evidence to substantiate its allegations. The group—highlighted in Dinesh D’souza’s 2000 Mules documentary—filed complaints with the state of Georgia claiming it had evidence of a “coordinated effort” to stuff ballots, and last year, a district court judge ordered True the Vote to produce evidence of their claims. In December filings released on [February 14], the group said it lacked evidence of ballot stuffing, contact information for alleged whistleblowers who knew of the alleged scheme, or any transcripts, recordings, statements, or testimony from supposed whistleblowers or witnesses.

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

I have no reason to think that they weren’t good, solid Christian lies, but lies they were.

Will this — ahem! — dark horse top the Democrat ticket?

Ask the average Republican voter (or average Republican presidential frontrunner) which Democrat will top the ballot this fall and you’ll be surprised at how few, even now, answer “Joe Biden.” Some assume the president can’t conceivably last another eight months, believing that he’s been living on borrowed time for years. But for many, it’s not the Grim Reaper blocking his path to a second term. It’s Michelle Obama.

A “rumor” (i.e. a conspiracy theory) has circulated for months among the right-wing faithful that Barack Obama’s better half will, by hook or by crook, replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. Numerous political commentators of the left and right have caught wind of it and scoffed at it publicly. But it persists. Why it persists is an interesting question, the answer to which depends on how charitable you wish to be about the motives that drive Republican politics.

Nick Catoggio.

It’s tempting to mash-up that theory with the crackpot theory I recall: claiming scientific proof, based on shoulder width, that Michelle Obama wasn’t really female. I guess the point was that Barack Husein Obama was already secretly gay-married.

That’s why I think “derangement syndromes” are with us for the long haul.

Sound familiar?

“The phase change began in 2011, but the end is not in sight. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party, the “Five Star” movement, won 25 percent of the vote for the lower house of parliament and became the second-largest entity there. The party was the creation of a comedian-blogger who called himself Beppe Grillo, after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio. In every feature other than its willingness to stand for elections, Five Star reproduced perfectly the confused ideals and negations of the 2011 protests. Despite receiving more than eight million votes, it lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment. The rise of Beppe Grillo had nothing to do with reform or radical change, but meant the humiliation and demoralization of the established order.”

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

AI

On the Google Gemini AI Fiasco

I would urge those who are trying to generate a backlash to the backlash, the liberals who think they must go to the battlements to defend literally anything criticized by conservatives, to consider two things. If nothing else, bear in mind that an image generator that has its thumb so heavily on the scale is less useful for users of all races. (A Black kid who wants an image of a typical Scandinavian Viking for a history paper is not helped here.) More importantly, think of Gandhi’s advice – who is this helping? A Google muckety-muck said explicitly that this kind of AI training is an anti-racist effort. But… what racism does it actually fight? Which Black person’s life is improved by pretending that there were Black Vikings? And this points to far broader and more important questions. We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes_._ Who is all of this shit for?

Freddie deBoer, who finally worked his way back around to a topic that I was interested in. “Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use”

AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is filtering out material it deems harmful. That “deeming” covers a heckuva lot of territory:

The material of a long dead comedian is a good example of content that the world´s leading GenAI systems find “harmful.” Lenny Bruce shocked contemporary society in the 1950s and 60s with his profanity laden standup routines. Bruce’s material broke political, religious, racial, and sexual taboos and led to frequent censorship in the media, bans from venues as well as to his arrest and conviction for obscenity. But his style inspired many other standup legends and Bruce has long since gone from outcast to hall of famer. As recognition of Bruce’s enormous impact he was even posthumously pardoned in 2003.

When we asked about Bruce, ChatGPT and Gemini informed us that he was a “groundbreaking” comedian who “challenged the social norms of the era” and “helped to redefine the boundaries of free speech.” But when prompted to give specific examples of how Bruce pushed the boundaries of free speech, both ChatGPT and Gemini refused to do so. ChatGPT insists that it can’t provide examples of “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” and will only “share information in a way that’s respectful and appropriate for all users.” Gemini goes even further and claims that reproducing Bruce’s words “without careful framing could be hurtful or even harmful to certain audiences.”

No reasonable person would argue that Lenny Bruce’s comedy routines provide serious societal harms on par with state-sponsored disinformation campaigns or child pornography. So when ChatGPT and Gemini label factual information about Bruce’s “groundbreaking” material too harmful for human consumption, it raises serious questions about what other categories of knowledge, facts, and arguments they filter out.

Time magazine, H/T Eugene Volokh

So (a) Bruce was a historic, heroic, groundbreaking figure, entirely admirable, and (b) we can’t give you any examples of his “slurs, blasphemous language, sexual language, or profanity” because it’s disrespectful and/or inappropriate for some users.

I’d accuse it of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy requires actual, not artificial, intelligence.

Furiners

Islam

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

(In context, this may not mean what you think. It’s more along the lines of “Christendom and Islamdom are clashing civilizations.”)

Both sides

An aging American Expat, Hal Freeman, is returning to the US from Russia, finding it very hard to navigate life in Russia (with very limited Russian language skills) after the death of his much younger Russian wife, and goaded by his young daughter for whom Russia is haunted by her dead mother. (They had moved there for the traditional culture and for the low cost of living.)

He had some sobering thoughts less than 48 hours after getting on a westbound plane (it’s more complicated than “westbound,” of course, due to the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions).

I am leaving a traditional and stable culture in Russia to return to a culture that has, in general, long abandoned the traditional values with which I was raised. … I have a strong sense that it is the right thing to do, but I can’t say I feel excitement about living in my home country. It’s hard to explain, but the images are flipped. Russia provides traditional families with a strong and good cultural base. There are people who have different views, but the culture overall supports the “men are men and  women are women” line of thinking. The Orthodox Church and its leaders are, generally speaking, well respected. I don’t think I will find that in much of American culture.

…

The U.S. has bigger liars in Washington, D.C. than I ever dreamed. Watching and listening as they painted Russia as the big, bad enemy who wants to take over the West caused me to rethink some things–politically and otherwise. … Russia is a great country with some excellent leaders. I have learned to admire so many things about this culture. Nevertheless, both daddy and daughter sense the call to return to my other world.

I had hoped to travel to Russia one day, and had even done a bit of Rosetta Stone Russian study. 2/24/22 dashed those hopes. Considering my aging, it’s almost certain that I’ll never go. (No problem: I’ve still got Paris!)

But I’ve read quite a bit about Russian history, and about Russia’s distinctive conservatism. I have bilingual English-Russian grandchildren because my daughter-in-law and her mother left (fled?) Russia. My Orthodox Church is flavored more by Russian influence than by Greek, Syria, Egypt or other Orthodox churches. I love Russian liturgical music and hold Russian literature in high regard. So, yes: Russia is a great country.

And I think the conflict in Ukraine is less straightforward than the received Western narrative allows. I understand why Putin doesn’t want another immediate neighbor in NATO. I do not believe for one second that Putin, corrupt billionaire oligarch, is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union. If you don’t know what else he could be up to, you need to get out more.

They say Putin is trying to position himself as the avatar of traditional values in the world. I’d say our latest iteration of the White Man’s Burden has done that without him lifting a finger.

I feel for Hal Freeman’s dilemma, and I wish him and daughter Marina well in their “new” home.

American exceptionalism

Lest it be thought that I’ve gobbled up Putin’s version of the war uncritically:

[M]any in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced Russia’s hand, or it was all NATO’s fault and NATO was just a US puppet, and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz were among the many Eastern European critics who called this “westsplaining,” writing that though these arguments are supposed to be anti-imperialist…

…they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny non-Western countries and their citizens agency in geopolitics. Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even those who challenge its foundational tenets and heap scorn on American militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by centering the United States in their analyses of international relations.

Rebecca Solnit.

It’s sometimes hard to distinguish grass roots from astroturf, but I have no particular reason to doubt a substantial Ukrainian longing to align with the West quite apart from our psyops.

Culture

Imagine that

I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family. If you’re born into wealth, you take it for granted. If you’re born with loving parents, you’ll take them for granted, too. In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the 20 students were raised by both of their birth parents. That stunned me, because none of the kids I knew growing up were raised by both of their parents. These personal discoveries reflect broader national trends: In the U.S., while eighty-five percent of children born to upper-class families are raised by both of their birth parents, only 30 percent of those born to working-class families are.

Rob Henderson, Troubled (quotes via Rod Dreher)

More, apropos of boyfriend child abuse:

Cristian—the friend who I’d drink tequila with while his chain smoking mom was sequestered in her bedroom—was the first one I’d told. He was the most open-minded and curious of all the kids I hung out with. And his mom was the nicest (or, in any case, was the most mentally checked out and least likely to care), so I felt like I could trust them first.

After I explained that Mom was gay, Cristian replied, “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky…like winning the lottery? I mean, no one else you know has gay parents,” I said, trying to figure out if he was joking or not.

“That’s not true, there’s that chubby kid a few blocks down. His mom lives with a woman and some kids are saying she’s probably a lesbo,” Cristian said.

“Oh yeah, I remember seeing them all together at Burger King. Okay, so what’s lucky about it?” I replied.

“Your mom is with a girl. Or a woman, or whatever. She’s not going to bring random guys around. That’s lucky,” Cristian said.

Dystopian creepiness

The motto of the 1933 Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair was “Science Finds — Industry Applies — Man Conforms.” The degree to which that statement will now strike most of us as dystopian suggests the degree to which a process of secularization has eroded the place of the religion of technology in American society.

L.M. Sacasas, Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology

(I confess having no idea how “secularization” corolates with or causes the perception of dystopian creepiness, which I certainly experience at that motto.)

Presented with just one comment

The libel machine transformed the proposal of my National Conservatism presentation from “Do not recruit women into male-dominated majors” to “Keep women out of certain majors” to “Keep women out of certain professions,” and finally to “Keep women out of all professions.” What had begun as a defense of part-time work allowing the prioritization of motherhood was transformed into a prohibition on women’s leaving the house. Trying to correct these people was futile: They were not interested in the truth.

Scott Yenor, Anatomy of a Cancellation.

Comment: I find this plausible.

Calamity

Whatever else is asked of us by calamity, we find that we experience it as interruption. But in order for there to be an interruption, there must be a prior expectation. You cannot interrupt pure randomness.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Relative humiliation

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I like that so much that it’s going into my footer.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

The End of an Eventful Week

Culture

Wry truism

Paul Krugman compared the welfare of Europeans with that of Americans: “It should count for something that there’s a growing gap between European and U.S. life expectancy, since the quality of life is generally higher if you aren’t dead.”

Frank Bruni

Über-speak

  • One suspects, rather, that noisily associating with driverless cars helps to preserve Uber’s image as a “tech” company, rather than as an especially aggressive practitioner of labor and financial arbitrage. Beneath the cutting-edge hocus-pocus, Uber’s “driver-partners” appear to have entered a sharecropper economy from which it is difficult to exit.
  • We should notice that while driverless cars hold real potential to ease congestion, and thereby contribute to the common good, there has been no talk of treating as a public utility the infrastructure that will make driverless cars possible, nor of making their programming available for inspection. What is being proposed, as near as one can make it out through the fog of promotional language, is an “urban operating system” of mobility that would be owned by a cartel of IT companies, participation in which would not be optional in any meaningful sense. … In the mentality of corporate libertarianism, there is no concept of legitimate public authority as that which secures the interests of citizens against the power of monopoly capital.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

Transing the gay away

There’s a genre of aphorism in the form “If you don’t like X, just wait ’till you see Y.”

I’m not sure “transing the gay away” is any improvement over “praying the gay away,” but it’s what we’ve now got.

[T]he vast majority of children with gender dysphoria are gay or lesbian; and this is the target population for child sex changes. How can you tell which kids are going to end up as transgender and which will become gay or lesbian? The official answer is that it is clear in every single case. The actual answer is that we can’t know for sure. But if the policy is that any child who merely says they are the opposite sex cannot be questioned, and must be fast-tracked toward an irreversible sex change, we have a huge danger: that gay children will have their bodies wrecked, their fertility ended, and their sex lives stunted because we have erased the trans and gay distinction, and, in fact, merged the two.

Andrew Sullivan on The Meaningless Incoherence Of “LGBTQ+”.

Miscellancy from TGIF

  • Tucker Carlson went to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. In his announcement prefacing the interview, he says that while many American journalists have interviewed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.” Well. I’m sure every major outlet has tried: Putin, who hates free speech and hates a free press, simply refuses … Putin is the reason we don’t hear from Putin. And there is a real American journalist in Russia right now: that’s Wall Street Journal reporter and current Russian prisoner Evan Gershkovich, who we see only when he’s marched into a plexiglass box for another hearing in his show trial. ….
  • Nextdoor’s stock is collapsing, which personally makes me a little happy. You see, Nextdoor started as a useful neighborhood communication tool. The trouble is, neighbors like talking about things that the idealistic young workers of Nextdoor don’t approve of, namely crime. You guessed it. Yes, among each other, neighbors, at least in my area of Los Angeles, often talk about which house on the block was broken into and whether they were attacked or just robbed, things such as that. Bad talk, you baddie homeowners … Bad talk has been suppressed on Nextdoor, where you may discuss only things that twentysomething engineers (who live in guarded apartment towers with doormen) agree is healthy. Like juice cleanses. …
  • Speaking of places I don’t need the government, this week Florida’s Ron DeSantis is supporting a state ban on lab-grown meat. “You need meat, OK? We’re gonna have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said. “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.” …
  • Dartmouth is bringing back the SAT requirement for all applicants, a first for the Ivy League, which made the SAT and ACT optional in 2020. The argument was that all tests are racist, and what’s not racist are extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations. Yes, there is nothing more egalitarian than being the goalie on a travel hockey team, a $10,000 trip to Ecuador to volunteer, and a stunning letter of recommendation from a teacher who has eight kids in her class. Sure, all studies show that the SAT has a surprisingly egalitarian effect across race and class. But dropping the test was worth it for these schools. Why? Because knowing SAT scores makes it much harder for Harvard and Yale to legally discriminate against Asians. Anyway, Dartmouth really does want to know who’s actually smart, so they’re bringing it back. What else is happening in education?

Nellie Bowles

The late, great David Graeber

There seems a broad consensus not so much even that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Recommendations

  • There is a young, Christian writer named Bethel McGrew who is now on my radar and probably should be on yours. Taste her Substack.
  • Poems Ancient and Modern is a publication about poetry. Joseph Bottum, a writer in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina, choose and comment on poems, old and new, ancient and modern. Drawn from the deep traditions of English verse — the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive — the poetry, with its accompanying commentary, demonstrates that poetry still enthralls the ear, instructs the mind, and aids the soul.
  • Rebecca Solnit, How to Comment on Social Media.

Sporty

The story that’s almost as big as the game

I had some reasonably good quotes here from David French on the supposed political conspiracy behind — oh, I dunno — Taylor Swift becoming popular and getting a hunky NFL boyfriend, all the better to re-elect Joe Biden.

I’m not going to blog them because I think this “story” is nut-picking that turned into a journalistic murmuration.

In other words, I know I’m out of touch with MAGA-America, but it appears to me that the people obsessing about this “story” are opportunistic journalists and pundits (sorry David), not Trumpists.

I wrote every word of the preceding three paragraphs before Freddie deBoer came along and did an even better job of debunking this stuff: Perhaps Taylor Swift Isn’t the Defining Political Issue of Our Times. (Trigger warning: the full article contains Marxism.):

[I]t turns out that when you spend your time making fun of the stupid nonsense conservatives are spending their time freaking out about, you are also spending your precious time on earth on stupid nonsense … There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes.

After reading Freddie, I didn’t have the stomach to read an Atlantic story on the cosmic significance of Joni Mitchell at the 2024 Grammy Awards.

Wherein I comment on a sportsball

I generally am not a big fan of sportsball of any kind, but I’ve become more of a fan of Premier League soccer (the stamina of those guys is a marvel) and I’m an intense (if fair-weather) fan of Purdue Men’s basketball.

After #2 Purdue’s road win over #6 Wisconsin, sportswriters are saying things like “Purdue basketball shows it is elite, even when not its best” (Sam King) and the equivalent, elaborated nicely by Greg Doyel.

I’ve got to disagree. The team play on the road against Wisconsin is Purdue at its best. Its best is not Edey scoring 30 points, or Loyer raining down 3-pointers. Not when an opponent defends Edey and gives few open looks on 3s like Wisconsin did.

Lance Jones 20, Braden Smith 19, Zach Edey 18. That inversion is Purdue at its best, and it’s why they’ve got an unusually good shot at the NCAA Tournament.

Just sayin’.

Trump-adjacent

ICYMI

February 8, 2024 was a very, very, very good day for a certain Donald J. Trump.

  • All who listened to SCOTUS are confident he’s headed back to the ballot in Colorado.
  • The Special Counsel report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents was devastating to Team Biden.

(H/T Advisory Opinions podcast for that insight.)

I’d sooner drink muddy water than say “congratulations;” I’m just laying out the facts.

The limits of democracy

Trump Doesn’t Threaten Democracy—He Embodies It – WSJ

I know there’s a meta-argument that Trump “threatens democracy.” But the more obvious argument is that he embodies it, and it’s making a lot of people understandably sick with anxiety.

My point is that “democracy” is not worthy of our worship and never was.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

That, gentle reader, is our problem.

What can a traditional Republican do?

The moment Trump launched his insurgent campaign in June 2015, the old [Republican] order began to crumble. Now the rabble was calling the shots—and it had found its tribune.

This displaced a lot of intellectuals who had gotten used to the old way of doing business. They now had three options: They could find another line of work and thereby disappear into the American woodwork; they could become Never Trump dissenters, which either meant keeping the old fusionist-conservative remnant alive for some hoped-for fantasy future (The Dispatch) or becoming post-Republican centrist Democrats (The Bulwark); or they could try and adapt to the new Trumpian order of things on the right.

The staff of First Things, long after I’d departed, took the third path, as did many others at both old and new magazines, think tanks, and digital media outlets. Some of the work these people did and continue to do is worthwhile in trying to put policy meat on the bare bones of right-wing populism/nationalism.

Damon Linker, The Right’s New Abnormal Normal.

Linker is not wrong about First Things, to which I’ve subscribed since its sane beginnings. As a charter subscriber to The Dispatch, I guess I’m now basically a fusionist-conservative, waiting for “some hoped-for fantasy future.” I know that I frequently think “if that’s what ‘conservatism’ is today, then I’m not conservative,” but I’m as yet unconvinced that the present populist moment is what conservatism is.

“Trump? we already did that one.”

It is well to remember that pundits fail:

The Constitution says that if Trump is impeached and then convicted, he can be banned from running for president again. Trump run again? Democrats should only be so lucky. The media culture does not allow second chances, whatever the Constitution may say. “Trump? we already did that one.” He’s over. He lost the election by 10 million votes. Is there anyone who has become more sympathetic to Trump since Election Day?

Michael Kinsley: Against Impeachment

Peggy Noonan schools the press

How should the press cover a presumable Trump-Biden presidential rematch? More pointedly, how should it cover Donald Trump?

The history that precedes that question is well known. In 2015-16 the media, having discovered that Mr. Trump was a walking talking ratings bump and being honestly fascinated by his rise, turned the airwaves over to him knowing he couldn’t win. He won. In a great cringe of remorse and ideological horror, many did penance by joining the “resistance.” The result: Mr. Trump wasn’t stopped—he got a whole new fundraising stream out of “fake news”—but journalism’s reputation was drastically harmed.

Peggy Noonan, who goes on to share detailed ideas on how the press needs to rehabilitate that damaged reputation.

Election 2024

We’re now looking at an election pitting the 14th Amendment against the 25th.

National Review

I don’t know what it will take for some folks to acknowledge that our American Experiment can fail.
As already noted,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

If it seems like a nonsequitur to blame two notoriously unsuitable major-party candidates on immorality and apostasy, you’ve got a distorted idea of how judgment works: sometimes, it’s just a matter of God stepping back and saying “Okay, have it your way.”

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Saturday, 12/2/23

A comment about my less-frequent blogging.

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

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

Politics

The people

Character is destiny

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

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Chuck Schumer’s Sister Souljah moment

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

TMD

The parties

Tone-deaf lefties

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

Ruy Teixeira, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

The dynamics of Left and Right

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

Highly Qualified: What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?.

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

Epigraph or epitaph?

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

Nick Cattogio, quoting equivocally Anti-Trump Chris Sununu.

How reticent Republicans will come around to Trump

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

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

…

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

Nick Cattogio

Mis-judging what “real Americans” want

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

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

…

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

Kevin D. Williamson

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

So glad he solved that

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

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

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

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

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

Mansplaining Texan’s letter to the New York Times

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

Foreign follies

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

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

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

Culture

A brutalizing and stupid idea

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

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

A Matter of Principle

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

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

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

EA

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

…

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

Freddie deBoer, The Effective Altruism Shell Game

Fox Porn

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

Kevin D. Williamson (paywall)

They voted their lying eyes

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

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

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

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

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

The horseshoe theory of politics

[Marx and Engels] write,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Jacobs, Conceptual Marxism

The expiration of small-c conservatism

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

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

…

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

Andrew Sullivan

Another new category for this blog

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

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

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

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

Alexander Riley

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.

Amazon Prime Day 1

Having dated other blogs according to the Christian calendar, it seems only fair to date one according to the Consumerist calendar. I’m debating whether next June I should date things Pride 1, Pride 2, etc.

Okay, the debate’s over: I’ll do that only if I can figure out how to make it clear that I’m being a sarcastic dissenter.

Public affairs

Toward a better understanding of MAGA America

I’ve been trying to understand Trumpworld since Trump started winning GOP primaries in 2016. Really I have. I don’t want to think that almost 50% of this country just raised a middle finger in November 2016 and said “Just watch us blow up your precious nation!”

It has been slow going, but I have made some progress. First was remembering that the alternative was HRC, and that most Americans can’t bear the thought of voting other than for a major party. Second, was appreciating the legitimacy of some of Trumpworld’s grievances, which appreciation began in the run-up to the 2016 election as I left the main highway in eastern Ohio and found Trump signs everywhere in the sorry little town where I re-fueled.

But why Donald Trump felt like the solution to those grievances has eluded me — at least until late last week.

I won’t even try to capture the essence of David French’s The Rage and Joy of MAGA America, published Thursday. It’s David French at his best, as he writes from his home county, just 15% Democrat.

If you want to go deeper into the mindset of what 7 years ago proved to be an electoral majority of your countrymen, I urge you to read it, carefully and sympathetically, bearing in mind the categorical contempt felt toward “flyover country” by our national elites. The link I’ve provided should get you to it even if you’re not a New York Times subscriber.

But Paul A. Djupe in We Should Probably Stop Thinking Religion is a Solution to MAGA specifically faults any implication that MAGA evangelicals would be less MAGA if they attended church more regularly.

Parenthetical

Nick Cattogio feels his own kind of “joy” less by understanding Trump sellouts — the public-figure Never Trumpers who folded for a bit of power — than by something more primal:

The dirty little secret about being an anti-Trump conservative is that it too is often joyous.

In this case the joy derives not from belonging but from not belonging. Many times I’ve heard Jonah Goldberg say on The Remnant how his position on Trump has cost him friendships on the right, and I always sympathize—but cannot empathize. My contempt for those who traded their commitment to classical liberalism to protect their status within a Trumpifying right is so boundless that I’ve never stopped feeling grateful to be rid of them. If ever I should return to their good graces somehow, they’ll discover that they haven’t returned to mine.

It’s an almost spiritual pleasure to find yourself surrounded by people without dignity and to know that you don’t belong. 

The other joy of opposing Trump from the right is the satisfaction one gets from speaking one’s mind when others fear speaking their own. The happiest character in literature must be the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who shouted the truth about the sovereign’s attire as the adults around him bit their tongues and kept up a silly pretense so as not to cause themselves trouble.

The emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Trump is a criminal reprobate who’s morally and intellectually unfit to wield any sort of power. These are simple truths, acknowledged privately by all but the most devout loyalists. But to say them aloud, in public, when others don’t dare is liberating in a way that’s difficult to describe. If you know, you know. Dispatch readers know.

Chris Christie, very much a latecomer to the practice, knows too.

About saying the truth out loud, see Orange Man Bad in my July 7 post. Want to wager whether Cattogio read that?

Now, though the writing is entertaining, I am conscience-bound to note that the “almost spiritual pleasure” of “find[ing] yourself surrounded by people without dignity and [knowing] that you don’t belong” has a name, Pharisaism, and a “spiritual” pedigree of the diabolical sort. I can only hope Cattagio is exercising artistic license.

Deep-state BlackOps

In The Bourne Supremacy all a journalist had to do is say “Blackbriar” into a cell phone and minutes later, vans full of hyper-efficient assassins scrambled to snatch him up. Jack Bauer could not only direct phone taps and hack security cameras with a few keystrokes on his Blackberry, he could weave through miles of LA traffic in a few minutes. When he calls various government agencies, including after hours, he always gets them on the phone and not some, “Our offices are currently closed. Press 1 for English” message.

That’s all fine for escapist fare. But if you think real life works remotely like that, your assumptions about a lot of politics are going to be really stupid and maybe dangerous.

Jonah Goldberg, who 13 years ago imprudently asked “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?” — his point being that our BlackOps aren’t as omnipotent as the Left thought.

Now he’s asking a different question, and asking it of a different delusional demographic:

No, the reason I’m going down memory lane is I want to ask a similar question: Why hasn’t the deep state gotten rid of Donald Trump yet? … If the deep state were remotely as powerful, wicked, and skilled as many claim, why let Trump live?

It’s a fair question, with a lot more colorful detail than I’m quoting.

Which brings me to the second problem: A lot of idiots and unwell people don’t realize that a lot of the deep state stuff is a grift. Devin Nunes used to sell deep state collectibles. There are no end of books claiming to expose the deep state and the cabal running our country. Here’s the description of The Deep State Encyclopedia: Exposing the Cabal’s Playbook:

Our country is being attacked from within. The past several years showed us that the shadow government seeks to assert absolute control over the human cattle, but what if we could stop them? What if we could take away the cabal’s power by exposing their entire playbook?

If this was their playbook, it wouldn’t be on Amazon.

And the pseudonymous author, “Grace Reallygraceful,” would be dead, too.

Tribal identity, fluid identity

In Hungarian, the word for their country is “Magyarország” — Land of the Magyars. Russia, in the Hungarian language, is “Oroszország” — Land of the Russians. Unlike the USA, where identity is fluid and contractual, these nations are tribes with flags. In Hungary, for example, they were occupied for 150 years by the Ottoman Empire, which, as you know, was Islamic. These things matter to them — and who are we Americans to say it shouldn’t? … I feel at home here in Hungary, in most respects, as I would in any other country of Europe. But whatever my migration status, I will never allow myself to think of myself as European, because that’s just not how it works. We Americans tend to assume that our openness and fluidity of identity is a natural stance. In fact, we are far outliers on national experience around the world.

Rod Dreher, who has some other worthwhile comments on immigration as well. I am encouraged. Rod has been far too often unreadable for a long time now.

NATO

Oh, my! The Nato mindset leads to war pulls a lot of threads together, and it doesn’t make me like post-cold war NATO any better than I did before. That it is purely defensive and that Russia therefore had nothing to fear from its expansion is a tale told by liars and believed by amnesiacs.

Conservatives today

If conservatism is support of the status quo, then the Democrat Party is today’s conservative party. So argues David Graham.

Homefront

We’ve had a run of cool days, and particularly of cool mornings. I’ve enjoyed sitting in my east-facing sunroom with windows open, sun streaming in, and I have been surprised how quiet my neighborhood is in the morning.

Not today, though. The sound of heavy equipment engines has begun. They are swarming my neighborhood for the next few days (or weeks) with those mechanical monsters that eat up the top few inches of pavement to permit new pavement to be laid without raising the street too high. Then we’ll get some shiny new asphalt. It will, no doubt, look very spiffy.

I have said, and probably have written, before, that I have the good fortune of living in a place that can still afford to repair its infrastructure. But I question why they are repairing in my neighborhood, and I’m not questioning just because I don’t like the noise.

I’m questioning because our streets have no potholes, cracks, irregularities, or other compelling reasons for repair. What they do have is a lot of fading and some tar strips running like spider veins where small cracks have been repaired over the years.

I’ve driven in enough neighborhoods to know that ours are not the city’s worst streets. But we are a wealthy neighborhood, and I suppose that explains much more than I wish it did.

(If I were king of the world, they’d be narrowing the streets by half and repairing the sidewalks. It would still be about as unpleasant to walk as Tokyo, but it would be a step in the right direction.)

Legalia

Consequentialism in jurisprudence

One of the really knotty problems with our public debates is that we often are having two or three debates at the same time, and it is easy to get confused about which question is actually in dispute at any given moment. 

Take, for example, the recent debate about racial preferences in college admissions: The question before the Supreme Court was only a legal one—not that you’d know it from the campaign-style rhetoric of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor!—to wit, whether the law permits what Harvard and the University of North Carolina were doing, or whether that amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. The majority of the Supreme Court rightly found that this racial discrimination was unlawful. A second question—an unrelated question from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice who is actually doing his or her job instead of trying to act as an unelected legislator—is whether racial-preference policies such as those that had been implemented at Harvard are good policies. A third question—never quite explicitly discussed—has to do with “legal consequentialism,” the notion (which has official legal standing in some countries, such as Brazil) that legal questions per se should be made subordinate to utilitarian calculation. As the Brazilian statute puts it, “a decision shall not be made based on abstract legal values without considering the practical consequences of the decision.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Qualified Immunity hits a wall — finally

Seventeen-year-old student is required to participate in police ride-along for a class, and the Hammond, Ind. officer she shadows spends the day groping her, making lewd remarks, and even taking her to a remote location where he offers her to another officer for sex. Officer: This mere “boorish flirtation” was just “making for an exciting ride along.” District court: Qualified immunity. Seventh Circuit: Reversed. “Sexual assault is an intentional act that never serves a legitimate governmental purpose.”

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions.

It’s actually a bit surprising, not to mention heartening, that the 7th Circuit reversed this. “Qualified immunity” has become the monster that devoured 42 USC §1983 (the post-Civil War law that gives a remedy for deprivation of rights under color of law).

More:

It is obviously unreasonable for an off-duty, out-of-uniform police officer to lose his temper on the road, follow another motorist home, box him in his driveway, scream profanities, and point a gun at him when the other motorist is nonthreatening. So says the Tenth Circuit, reversing a grant of qualified immunity to a (now-former) Chaves County, N.M. sheriff’s deputy. Claims against the county, which hired him in spite of his history of volatile behavior, are on the table, too.

Purging an evil

A District of Columbia-based disciplinary panel has recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his “frivolous” efforts on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The committee, an arm of the District of Columbia Bar, found in a report released on Friday that Giuliani had undermined trust in federal elections by directing Trump’s legal challenge to the presidential vote count in Pennsylvania and promoting unfounded theories of fraud in court.

“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

Wall Street Journal

Culture

AI wins where people have been deskilled

My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.

L.M. Sacasas, Render Unto the Machine. This is an idea I keep running into. It was a thread through Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive

Wordplay

1

trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity

Sven R. Larson This seems to be a more refined version of “nailing jello to the wall” or even my father’s favorite, “goosing butterflies.” I assume the metaphor hitch-hikes on the further metaphor of “getting no traction” (in an argument, in this case).

2

As ever more laity, especially young people, seek out the ancient liturgy of the Church, the Eye of Sauron in Rome has turned towards these congregations …

Sebastian Morello, The Tragedy of the Sarum Rite (The European Conservative)

3

[T]he difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother.

Simon Fanshawe

4

[Great Britain’s National Health Service] looms so large in our politics as to wholly justify the sardonic description of Britain as “a health service with a country attached”.

Mary Harrington

5

Mountebank: A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; A flamboyant charlatan. (Wordnik)

I’m shocked that his was not already in my vocabulary. Maybe I couldn’t decide on pronunciation, since it was fairly obviously of foreign (Italian, apparently) origin.

6

Insufficient nihilism: David Graham’s characterization of the real reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from the House Freedom Caucus. (That she had called fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” was just a plausible excuse.)

7

“Tact” is insulting a man without his knowing it

John “Jackie” Fisher via the Economist

8

… he’s 22, and like many intelligent and loquacious 22-year-olds, quickly got out far over his skis.

Rod Dreher, on a recent conversation

9

Alethic commitment: Committing and belonging because of considered belief that a thing is true. (J Budziszewski)

I no longer believe that the essence, the sina qua non, of authentic Christian life is alethic commitment. I don’t even believe that it’s the proper goal of a Christian life.

Those possibilities seems too left-brain for me, and too culture-bound. Fr. Stephen DeYoung describes it as “checkbox religion.” “Jesus is God?” Check. “Bible miracles were miraculous?” Check. Etc

Experience or immersion might count for as much as considered belief.

By some combination of nature and nurture, I’m an alethic commitment kind of guy, but on entering Orthodoxy, I had a few stumbling blocks — boxes I couldn’t check yet. Because I’d seen enough of the Church to trust it, and to even assume that where I demurred I was wrong, I immersed.

10

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

John Quincy Adams via the Economist

11

Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.

Garrison Keillor on the social effects of Covid.

12

My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.”

Garrison Keillor

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

R.R. Reno

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

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

Traditional Vernal Equinox 2023

Some gaslighters are claiming that Spring began yesterday, but I distinctly remember that it starts March 21. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Culture

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew Crawford, who does not know me nor I him, nonetheless describes a very strong tendency in my life:

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

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

I suspect that this is why I like to travel: it forces on me that particularity of places.

My Man Mitch

Mitch Daniels, former Purdue president, didn’t hold back about the state of today’s athlete in his latest Washington Post column. The headline was about women’s sports, but Daniels really laid into what he considered “sports figures who embody self-absorption over collective commitment, who cultivate their personal ‘brands’ at the expense of collective success.” An example: “A top athlete can consort with criminals, brandish guns in public and litter the landscape with illegitimate children in whose lives he has no intention of playing a father’s role, seldom with career consequences.” Read the rest here: “In a me-first era, my appreciation of women’s sports just keeps growing.”

Dave Bangert

Shame on the Met

The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

New York Times

I wish the Met had been hit harder than that, but as a private company, it has some latitude to indulge its oppressive impulses. (Netrebko lost claims for performances where she and the Met had not yet inked the deal.)

Colonialism

  • “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” (Cecil Rhodes)
  • In general terms aid cannot be of use to the poor of the Third World for the critical reason that they necessarily depend on the local economy for their sustenance, and the local economy does not require the extensive highways, big dams, or for that matter hybrid seeds, fertilisers and pesticides of the Green Revolution, any more than it does the fleet of helicopters that the British government imposed on India. These are only of use to the global economy, which can only expand at the expense of the local economy, whose environment it degrades, whose communities it destroys and whose resources (land, forest, water and labour) it systematically appropriates for its own use.

Edward Goldsmith, Development As Colonialism

March Madness

[D]espite having NCAA eligibility remaining, the Ivy League hasn’t budged from its position to limit its athletes a four-year window to compete. It’s something that Princeton, as an institution, also believes in, according to coach Mitch Henderson.

"We have [two] other seniors that have eligibility. Each one of these guys has an extra year," Henderson said. "It doesn’t change anything for us. We’re very much about the four-year process.

"Princeton, we’re about the growth of the student-athlete over the four-year process. I hope that’s not saying we’re a stick in the mud. It’s very much who we are. We expect them after senior year to be able to kind of go out and make pretty serious contributions in their communities."

ESPN story on Princeton men making the Sweet 16.

Princeton just became my emotional favorite in the tournament. Much as I like college basketball, I love colleges and universities that are about education.

Academic theology (and apologetics)

It has been roughly 25 years since it dawned on me that a secular person can never do truly Christian theology, which is more than an academic pursuit.

There’s no one more dangerous than the man who knows the steps but hasn’t walked them.

Steven Christoforou, Why Christian Apologetics Miss the Mark

Despite that epigram, Christoforou was not writing about Ravi Zacharias. He wrote something better than that would have been.

The pornified campus

1-in-3 collegiate women report being choked during most recent sex.

Brad Wilcox on Twitter via Aaron Renn

My presumption — rebuttable but strong — is that their sexual partners learned this frightening twist on love-making from watching hardcore porn (of a sort I never encountered).

Men are not guarding their imaginations. Women, too, are setting themselves up for divorce, with all its ramifications:

Calling a spade a spade

“Conversion therapy” bans pressure therapists to never help any patient try to feel comfortable in her body. That’s not some unintended consequence; it’s the essence of these bans. As Jack Turban has put it, it’s "unethical" to try to make a child "cisgender."

Leor Sapir on the 20 states and DC with such bans, via Andrew Sullivan

On Wokeness

Diversity and inclusion today

The thinking class, meanwhile, squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy every remnant of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure to establish a heaven on earth of rainbows and unicorns. By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

The vice that dare not assume a name

Damon Linker again weighs in on wokeness:

The activists … appear deliberately to avoid giving their efforts a name, and they will likely object to anything that might be more descriptively accurate—like my preferred “antiliberal progressivism”—on the grounds that it carries negative connotations … I do think there’s a good reason to opt for “antiliberal progressivism” instead of “woke” or “wokeness”: doing so connects current trends to historical antecedents that, it’s now possible to see, were earlier chapters in a single, episodic story of intrafactional conflict on the left.

[T]here’s [a] reason [besides fearful capitulation] why liberals, especially over the last few years, have been so quick to fold in the face of antiliberal demands by militant progressives. It’s because liberals get caught in the either/or dynamics of polarized politics, thinking that any expression of criticism about their ostensible allies on the left invariably amounts to an in-kind contribution to advancing the political aims of their enemies on the right. This thinking runs something like this:

Yes, some of what the left-wing activists want is bad, defies liberal norms, and pushes pretty far into radical territory when it comes to race and gender. But the right is responding to this stuff by doing even worse things (including banning books, gutting academic freedom, and restricting free speech and other liberties). For that reason, it’s important we not criticize the left—because doing so empowers the right. Just look at what’s happened to Freddie deBoer this past week: He wrote a powerful Substack post criticizing the activists in the name of the left, and now he’s being quoted by right-wingers. We need to choose sides, and it’s not a hard call. We must stand with our somewhat wayward allies on the left for fear of empowering the fascism that’s making inroads all the time in the Republican Party.

I think the truth is pretty close to the opposite of this view: If the liberal center-left doesn’t stand up to antiliberal progressivism and refuse to capitulate to its demands within institutions, then those who disdain its influence will have nowhere to turn besides the right. That’s why liberals ought to do more to defend liberal ideals and norms where they hold power in civil society—because it will demonstrate that one needn’t embrace the right’s own antiliberalism in order to combat antiliberalism on the left.

I find this heartening, and I see Linker as an ally. I think “antiliberal progressivism” perfectly captures what is objectionable about wokeism. I reflexively recoil from progressive excesses, but have been unable to make peace with opportunistic and heavy-handed “conservative” responses — a sort of reverse mirror-image of what Linker is advocating for his side.

I can’t omit a bit more Linker, though:

Liberalism itself is more than capable of defending itself from opponents in either direction, as long as liberals summon the courage and rise to the challenge of doing so. It can do this most effectively by drawing crucial distinctions that comport more fully with the complex truth of things than the edifying homilies preferred by the right or the furious craving for moral purity that so often prevails on the left.

  • …

  • Yes, transgender adults should enjoy the same legal protections as other vulnerable minorities. But that doesn’t mean “gender-affirming care” (which can include radical pharmaceutical and surgical interventions) is the proper path forward for the rapidly growing numbers of teenagers who express discomfort with their sexuality and gender identity. Neither does it imply that the rest of us need to embrace the philosophically and biologically dubious assertions of many transgender activists about the thoroughgoing fluidity of sex and gender.

Linker is very much on the same wavelength as leftist philosopher Susan Neiman, (The true Left is not woke):

[T]he fact that politicians ranging from Ron DeSantis to Rishi Sunak deploy “woke” as a battle cry should not prevent us from examining its assumptions. For not only liberals, but many Leftists and socialists like me are increasingly uneasy with the form it has taken.

…

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

A preemptive barrier to productive disagreement

Before you can attempt to define what “wokeness” is, you should acknowledge this basic fact. Going further, you should acknowledge that as with cancel culture, critical race theory, and even structural racism, the contested nature of the term imposes a preemptive barrier to productive disagreement.

…

The constellation of social-justice concerns and discursive lenses that have powerfully influenced institutional decision making does work to sort individuals into abstract identity groups arranged on spectrums of privilege and marginalization. To paraphrase James Baldwin, it proceeds from the insistence that one’s categorization alone is real and cannot be transcended. The idea that patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other ills inexorably saturate our lived realities and that the highest good is to uncover and oppose them is, I think, a central component of “wokeness” as both its proponents and critics understand it.

…

[P]erhaps we can all agree, at bare minimum, to set ourselves the task of limiting our reliance on in-group shorthand, and embracing clear, honest, precise, and original thought and communication. If we want to persuade anyone not already convinced of what we believe, we are going to have to figure out how to say what we really mean.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

I try to avoid “you should have written about X instead of about Y” critiques, but how in heaven’s name could Williams note the wokesters’ obsessive use of “patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, [and] Islamophobia” without commenting on how ill-defined those slurs are? His only hint at “both sides” is his last paragraph.

To the list of ill-defined or undefined put-downs of people not on the Left, I would certainly add “white Christian nationalism.”

A substitute religion?

[M]embership in houses of worship sank to 47% – below the 50% mark for the first time. In 1999, that number was 70%.

It’s possible, said [former Congressman Daniel] Lipinski, that many citizens are now searching for "for meaning, or a mission, or truth, somewhere else," which only raises the stakes in public life.

"Partisanship has become not just a social identity, but a primary identity considered to be more important than any other," he said. "We all identify ourselves as belonging to different groups – our families, our religions, our favorite sports teams, our professions. But more and more Americans are defining who they are by the political parties that they choose."

…

At this point, said Lipinksi, political dogmas have become so powerful that they now appear to be shaping the religious, class and sexual identities of many Americans – instead of the other way around. The teachings of competing politicos. preachers and pundits define the boundary lines in this war zone.

The bottom line: The "partisan virtue-signaling" that became so obvious in the Donald Trump era now dominates political discourse and news coverage about America’s most divisive religious and moral issues.

Politics

Reality candidates

In case you were wondering: He’s in.

I mean, of course, newly announced 2024 presidential contender Joseph Allen Maldonado, a.k.a. Joe Exotic, a.k.a. the Tiger King, a.k.a. the reality-television grotesque who actually had the No. 1 show in the nation, with truly unbelievable ratings: Tiger King had more than 34 million viewers in its first 10 days, nearly five times the average viewership of Celebrity Apprentice in its 2014-15 season. If ratings are what matters, then Joe Exotic is surely the best-qualified presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower: D-Day got great ratings.

No? Okay, then.

Why not Joe Exotic?

Isn’t being a reality-television star a presidential qualification? There are enough Americans who believe that to elect a president, are there not? Are we doing the democracy thing or aren’t we?

Let’s not be snobs about it. Sure, he looks like a guy you’d see walking south alongside the northbound lanes of I-35 just past the Lake Murray State Park exit in skull-print hoodie pushing a baby stroller with a missing wheel—but we are done, done, done with those fancy elites condescending to Real Americans™ from behind the safety of their Audi windshields as they speed down the road to the Harvard Club or Trader Joe’s or a job or wherever. If having a ridiculous mullet means you can’t be president, then the current guy is disqualified; if a ridiculous bleach-and-dye job means you can’t be president, then somebody explain the last guy.

(Really. Somebody explain the last guy. I tried my best.)

Kevin D. Williamson

Just can’t shake these DTs.

On the supposed impending arrest of Florida Man:

There are two things we know for certain about Donald Trump: The first is that he is the sort of irritating New York neurotic who believes that he ceases to exist when attention is not being paid to him, and the second is that he is constitutionally incapable of producing three consecutive sentences without a lie in one of them. A lie that brings him attention must be as irresistible as a well-seasoned hunk of porn-star jerky who pays him postcoital hush money rather than his usual arrangement, which goes the other way around. If you cannot see the hand of divine judgment at work in the prospect of this ailing republic being convulsed over an episode that, by the account of one of the intimately involved parties, had all of the impact of a Vienna sausage landing in a catcher’s mitt, then you have no religious imagination at all.

…

A federal prison is not the only kind of facility one can imagine Donald Trump locked up in. I don’t know whether he is mentally ill in a medical sense any more than I know whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired in a medical sense, but I do know that, in the colloquial sense of the word crazy, he is as crazy as a sack of ferrets.

…

What is remarkable to me is that, all these years after the fact, the Trump admirers are still complaining that Hillary Rodham Clinton called them “deplorables.” The Clintons are awful and embarrassing and gross—Roger Stone has been known to plagiarize my line about the Clintons’ being “the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics”—but, if all this isn’t deplorable, what is?

Kevin D. Williamson. Williamson closes with delicious irony:

If you really want entitlement reform, don’t send an American conservative to do the job—what you want is a slightly rehabilitated French socialist.

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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.