I have come to care very little about a writer’s politics. I only care whether the writer appears to be sane and a truth-teller. There are many truth-tellers on the Left and there are many deranged and vile liars on the Right (where my reflexive sympathies lie).
You could call that my epigram today.
Rejecting bitterness
Why is a bitter “I told you so” so much more gratifying than finding agreement? Abigail Shrier’s Three New Year’s Resolutions for Americans is a challenging start to the year:
Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM. They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.
…
The transparently reckless progressive policy vision should have been a nonstarter with centrists and liberals. It didn’t take a PhD to know that cutting the breasts off teen girls in mental distress was a disastrous failure of psychology and medicine.
…
Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.
(Emphasis added). I plan to re-read this at least once after it rests a while.
Chastity belts of ideology
Rather than dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one’s identity, having impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and therefore dangerous.
A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Bari Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times. (Source)
The scourge that dare not speak its name
The brief annual preoccupation of Western societies with the so-called homeless (more accurately described as the family-less) is a good deal better than nothing … But why are there destitute people at all in our great 21st-century cities? The consequences of a society that has simultaneously licensed the dismantling of lifelong marriage and the widespread use of mind-altering drugs might have something to do with that. But who will put this right? Nobody, so far as I can see. These are causes so lost as to be almost unmentionable among the polite.
Even when Fundamentalists set out to defend the truth, their temptation was to rally large constituencies to the cause rather than to prepare for scholarly exchange.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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.
A cyber-friend asked If you could wave a magic wand and have Christians in the USA instantly and deeply understand a concept, mental model, biblical theme, theological topic, etc. etc., what would it be?
My reply: That the Church did not begin at Azusa Street, in a Second Great Awakening tent revival, during the First Great Awakening, or with Henry VIII, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Augustine of Hippo or even the first New Testament codex.
Pragmatic Xianity
Bryan assumed the truth of Christianity, but his defense of it was essentially pragmatic. Rather than arguing for its factuality, as Machen did, he argued the good it did for humankind. “There has not been a great reform in a thousand years that was not built about [Christ’s] teachings,” he proclaimed, and “there will not be in all the ages to come.”
I doubt that Bryan’s faith, as described, is “saving faith.” On the other hand, Christendom can always use allies.
The American Sense of Scripture
When Vice President Mike Pence delivered his speech at the Republican National Convention, it was like witnessing a Walker Percy satire. Pence remixed Hebrews 12:1-2 and 2 Corinthians 3:17, by replacing “Jesus” with “Old Glory,” the “saints” with “this land of heroes,” and even interjected his own biblical gloss—“that means freedom always wins.”
People rightly recoiled from Pence’s failed attempt at civic religion. How could the Vice President replace Jesus “the author and perfecter of our faith” with the American flag? Why would he substitute American heroes for the saints? And, what definition of freedom could Pence be using to conclude that “freedom always wins”? After all, the American sense of Scripture is not one of the classic senses of Scripture. Those would be the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.
If you have read Percy’s Love in the Ruins, which is about—as the subtitle tells you—“The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World,” then Pence’s speech would sound strangely familiar ….
I never understood the hatred of Hoosier liberals for Governor Mike Pence. But I cringed when he agreed to run as Trump’s Vice President, and I’ve never found his Christianish faith a great reassurance.
It’s harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle
L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers’ fortune passed $100 billion this year. But here’s what I found intriguing (besides her black hair at age 70 — after all, she’s worth it):
Ms Bettencourt Meyers is said to favour privacy over attending social events frequented by many of the world’s wealthy.
She is known to play the piano for several hours a day and has written two books – a five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods.
“She really lives inside her own cocoon. She lives mainly within the confines of her own family,” said Tom Sancton, who authored the book The Bettencourt Affair.
“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . .” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
My sorta kinda “life verse”
In my Evangelical boarding school, there was a little bit of pressure to identify your “life verse” — one snippet of Scripture that was your very own guiding light.
That’s asking a lot of immature kids, and I don’t recommend it.
But as a matter of fact, one verse did kind of grab me, and looking back 56+ years, I could even see it as my unexpected guiding light:
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
That’s my other New Year’s Wish for my readers, though it’s more closely related to the first than you might think.
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.
Liberalism is so unlikely and fantastic, John Milbank observes, because it proceeds by inventing a wholly artificial human being that has never actually existed, conceived in abstraction from his gender, birth, associations, beliefs, and equally indifferent as to whether he is a creature of God, a rational animal, an accident of evolution, or a puddle of genes. And then it imagines that we are all instances of such species.
Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.
Sensing the vibes weren’t right, Columbia postponed its annual Giving Day, which usually raises tens of millions for the school. It’s really hard to shake down Jewish alumni when your faculty and students are also trying to do a pogrom. The list of donors who are pulling their gifts keeps growing: the latest is billionaire Leon Cooperman, who declared on television: “I think these kids at the colleges have shit for brains.”
…
State suicide is now a top cause of death in Canada: New statistics have come out that show a shocking 4 percent of all deaths in Canada are now thanks to the country’s assisted suicide scheme, the fifth leading cause of death.
So a couple of things: we have not seen any credible threats. I know there’s been all these questions about credible threats, and so I want to be sure that that’s out there. But look, Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, pooh-poohing rising antisemitism, via Nellie Bowles.
According to FBI data, Muslims make up about 1 percent of the population and are the target of 9.6 percent of hate crimes. Jews make up about 2 percent of the population and are the target of 51.4 percent of hate crimes.
In [disgraced attorney Jenna] Ellis’s case, she complained that Trump wasn’t doing much to help her raise funds for her legal defense, even though she was being targeted for working on his behalf. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast last month. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Elsewhere, Nick Cattogio muses about Forgiving Jenna Ellis and concludes that he’s not ready yet — partly because her remorse follows a lot of high dudgeon after and about her indictment, and partly because he can’t believe that Trump’s toxic narcissism only now registered with her.
He has a point, doesn’t he?
Education in Oregon
Students don’t need to learn things: You don’t need another rant about the logic behind letting teachers stop measuring whether their teaching is working. So I’ll just leave this here, from the Oregon-based Observer:
Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing, or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday, Oct. 19, extending the pause on the controversial graduation requirement that began in 2020.
Pair that with this chart of American ACT scores:
At this point I’m convinced American public school teachers have been captured as foreign agents bent on weakening the population. There is no other explanation. Moon landing was fake and teachers are all CCP assets.
Conquest’s Third Law: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
Via Rod Dreher
A swarm of MAGA lawyers
There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.
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.
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.
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
No sooner had I posted than I found related thoughts:
One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.
Given the destructive fruitlessness of religio-political conflicts in the Reformation era, Catholics and Protestants alike built on trends that antedated the Reformation and decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion, thus permitting their self-colonization by capitalism in the industrious revolution. In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states, a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyperpluralism.
These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.
MacIntyre acknowledges that such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
The Coptic Church was brought onto the world stage more recently through the terrible act of violence carried out by ISIS against twenty-one migrant workers on a Libyan beach in February 2015. How did this incident help to demonstrate the importance of loving one’s enemies?
That was a pivotal point, I think, that impacted many people around the world, religious and nonreligious. It was an act of such inhumanity that it crossed a line that many were not ready to cross. The impact the executions made had two sources. The first was the men themselves, the twenty Coptic Christians and their Ghanaian friend. Their resilience, their strength, their utterance of the name of Christ to the very end was a real display of grace.
Just as in the Book of Daniel the three young men in the fiery furnace had a fourth with them, I am sure there was a twenty-second man on that beach. Christ must have been in their midst because their peace was visible on their faces.
The second reason the execution made such an impact was the reaction of the victims’ families. The German novelist Martin Mosebach was so moved by the story that he traveled to Egypt to write his book The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs (Plough, 2019). He went to live with the families, expecting to see people broken by an act that had taken away their men, but he found them celebrating their witness and forgiving the perpetrators. I think that was an eye opener.
When word of the executions first reached Britain, I had over thirty interviews in the twenty-four hours following the announcement. And all the interviewers asked me, “How can you possibly forgive?” Because in my first interview I had spoken about forgiving the perpetrators. It was such a countercultural, counterintuitive sentiment. And I think it was another display of grace. It is the grace of God in us that allows us to love as he loves and to forgive as he forgives.
Forgiveness is tied into loving God – which includes loving ourselves as the image and likeness of God. Because it is in seeing that image and likeness within us and within everybody else, including our enemies, that we are then led to love and to forgive everybody. Not forgiving the action itself but the person committing the action; never justifying or accepting the hostility itself, but recognizing human brokenness and realizing that we’re all broken and we all need God’s forgiveness. In recognizing that, we can begin to love the image and likeness of God in the perpetrators, forgive them, and pray for them that their broken humanity could one day be restored.
I blush at “Christian” America’s failure to live up to this. Maybe the worst example is the practice of admitting “victim impact statements” at criminal sentencing hearings, where victims and their families are, basically, invited into court to vilify, rail on, and expressly refuse to forgive their victimizers.
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.
It’s striking how people can be blown away by Mr. Athos’ antiquity and seeming immutability without (apparently) considering the possibility that those traits form a fairly compelling case for Orthodox Christianity.
I must have brought some premises they’re not bringing (though my experience was of an American parish, not of the Holy Mountain, which I won’t visit until October).
Thwarted
One of the strangest expressions of Julian [The Apostate]’s cultural program was a project to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. As a former Christian, he was aware that the destruction of the temple by the Romans had been prophesied by Jesus. By rebuilding it, he believed he could undermine the Christian faith and bolster Judaism as an alternative to it. The project was a complete failure. Even non-Christian sources from the time reported that efforts to restore the foundation were met with setbacks so perplexing and mysterious as to appear divinely ordained.
Ultimately, the future of Anglo-Catholicism lies with Orthodoxy or a reconstituted Old Catholicism because they have held to the reformed catholic identity within Anglicanism whilst rejecting its doctrinal Protestantism. The neo-Evangelicals ultimately have more in common with the Holiness and Pentecostal churches through the Convergence Movement than they do with wider Anglicanism because they share the same sort of spirituality, albeit in a moderated form. This leaves the Confessional Anglicans who share more in common with moderate Lutheran and Reformed Christians than they do the Anglo-Catholics and the Neo-Evangelicals.
Christian nationalisms and civil religions are a kind of Great Commission in the reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity in the name of the blood and of the soil and of the political order. The gospel is not a means to any end, except for the end of union with the crucified and resurrected Christ who transcends, and stands in judgment over, every group, every identity, every nationality, every culture.
I always appreciate reviews of Russell Moore’s books because, despite my liking the guy and thinking he’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I rarely enjoy his books themselves, and I rarely finish them. I think my problem with them is a combination of:
Thoughtful as he is generally, Moore reflexively equates Evangelicalism and “the Church.”
Articulate as he is generally, Moore’s native language is Evangelicalese.
Maybe most of all, I have the icky feeling that I’m voyeuristically watching a family feud.
When I write those down, I can’t help but notice that he’s an Evangelical writing for Evangelicals. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for him, but small wonder then that his writing isn’t always my cup of tea.
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
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.
Having previously sandboxed politics, I can give you something entirely different now (with the sole exception of the last Wordplay entry).
What to do with a whistle-blower
When someone blows a whistle, one option is to smear them for months and hire a billboard truck to keep it up. The other option is to take a breath and listen.
I remember the days when GLAAD was against defamation. It was right in its name. But when you’ve got a nice grift going, you don’t let a little something like winning stop you; you reinvent your mission and carry on.
Our cult of expertise
“Doctor’s Orders.” In a brilliant cover story for Harper’s, Jason Blakely delves into the ways that COVID exposed the epistemic contradictions at the core of American public life: “American democracy and scientific authority are suffering parallel crises of credibility, each standing accused by the other. This twofold crisis has many causes, among them political polarization and the spread of misinformation on social media, as well as long-standing antirationalist religious traditions and anti-intellectual strains in American business and culture. None of these factors should be minimized when attempting to understand America’s widespread antiscientific sentiment. But they need to be supplemented by another, far less widely acknowledged, fount of skepticism—one that requires contending with what the populist view gets right: scientific expertise has encroached on domains in which its methods are unsuited to addressing, let alone resolving, the issue at hand.”
I first noticed this, and objected strenuously, when MDs were asked to opine on the “quality of life” of unconscious patients — a philosophical question on which MDs had and have no expertise. If I’d been a judge, I’d have sustained an objection on that basis. Doctors would sometimes make up “suffering” through the supposed indignity of utter dependence on others, assuming that a rational person would prefer death (and that by starvation and dehydration, no less) over total dependence.
(Gilbert Meilander once wrote a column titled I Want To Burden My Loved Ones, bless him. That was pretty counter-cultural.)
Potemkin Forest
He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road and peers through the woods on the other side. More moonscape stretches down the mountainside. He starts up the truck and drives. The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.
He stops at a gas station to tank up. He asks the cashier, “Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”
The man takes Douggie’s silver dollars. “Shit, yeah.”
“And hiding it behind a little voter’s curtain?”
“They’re called beauty strips. Vista corridors.”
“But … isn’t that all national forest?”
The cashier just stares, like maybe there’s some trick to the question’s sheer stupidity.
“I thought national forest was protected land.”
The cashier blows a raspberry big as a pineapple. “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory. The book is fiction, but I suspect this bit’s fact-based.
Troll Epistemology
On a related note:
It’s called the “good cop, bad cop” routine, but in practice the bad cop always comes first. Softens you up, makes you want it to stop. Then comes the good cop with a kindly smile and a quiet voice. Or: You were right to think of social media as rage-bait, but you were mistaken about what came next, what happened after you took the bait. So much shouting, such cacophony; you needed to escape. You couldn’t stop scrolling, not altogether, not at first, but you needed something more soothing…on another screen. Theses days the big streaming services push showrunners to make TV shows less demanding of viewers’ attention—they say, This isn’t second screen enough, it needs to be smoother, like smooth jazz, like visual Muzak. Calming. …
Alan Jacobs, The Way Your Mind Ends. Do click through and read on; it’s short enough, and I thought it unfair to Hedgehog Review to copy and paste all of it.
Wordplay
Must everyone grind the same axe?
The “She didn’t write the article I wanted her to write!” critique trap.
I doubt that Jesse Singal coined that phrase, but I encounter what it describes all the time. Occasionally, the omitted point or theme might have made “the article” stronger; oftener, it’s mostly a demand that everyone grind the same axe.
Pronoia
Pronoia the belief that the universe is conspiring in your favour – the opposite of paranoia. (H/T Dense Discovery)
Beauty
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
Dorothy Parker
Russian rallies
I went to a rally, and what happened? Did it change anything? Yes it did: I was fired!
A Russian participant in a Carnegie Endowment study on a rally against the Ukrainian invasion by Russia, via Plough.
Everything sounds better in French
Word of the week:portrait parlé, or “speaking image”, the original name for the modern mugshot, which was invented in France. Donald Trump had his taken on August 24th. Read the full story.
Truth
The truth is not facts. They come and go. They truth is a deeper, more anarchic weave of polyphonic eruptions.
We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I tried, I really did, to keep politics out of my blog draft. But I failed.
So now I do the second best: sandbox it and warn readers.
Vice leaves few good choice to virtue
Dispatch family quarrels aren’t like normal family quarrels. In a normal family quarrel, a conservative dad might bellow about witch hunts and politicized justice while his liberal daughter pounds the table, insisting that no one is above the law.
In a Dispatch family quarrel, one side demands that Donald Trump be prosecuted for all of the crimes while the other demands that he be prosecuted for merely some of the crimes.
…
The Justice Department … declined to pursue Trump aggressively for more than a year and a half after January 6 and only named Jack Smith special counsel after Trump had formally announced his 2024 candidacy … So ask yourself, and be honest: Would any of these cases have been brought if Trump had chosen to live out his days playing golf at Mar-a-Lago instead of insisting on one last grudge match with American democracy?
…
I’m so invested in deterrence that I’d be willing to trade the forms we’re currently pursuing for forms that don’t involve prosecution. If the Senate had convicted and disqualified Trump at his second impeachment trial, as it should have, that in itself would have taught a powerful lesson to future autocrats about the steep cost of power grabs. You may or may not lose your liberty if you try it but you’ll certainly lose your career in politics and whatever stature you had as a public figure.
And so we return to Marco Rubio and the cowards in the Senate GOP caucus. As I see it, they all but forced the criminal justice system to try to hold Trump accountable when they refused to do so themselves.
Now here they are, whining about it.
…
Prosecutors looked at that, it seems, and concluded that if the political system can’t hold Trump accountable because of Republican cultism, the justice system had to step in—especially when he’s running for president semi-explicitly on gaining power in order to evade all forms of accountability, legal and otherwise. They let politics influence their decisions to charge him, I think, and law enforcement making decisions based on politics is corrupt. Yet an authoritarian earning legal impunity from the perks of his office and the slavishness of his lackeys in the legislature is also corrupt.
Both are slippery slopes. But I’d rather have a flawed system of accountability than none at all.
Cattogio’s overall point — damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t — can be viewed as an elaboration of David French’s observation:
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.
Trump’s tactical mistake?
Trump is done persuading people to like him.
One of the (female) participants in the radio Atlantic podcast for 8/25/23.
That decision may, God willing, be fatal to his candidacy, assuming that some have turned against him for January 6 and that they’ll take some wooing to get them back.
On the other hand, Biden’s negatives are really high and those who detest Kamala Harris might doubly hesitate to vote for him. Could this turn into a reprise of the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race between Edwin Ewards, crook, and David Duke, KKK Wizard? There famously emerged a bumper sticker for the ages: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
Debate highlights
The fact is that no one is telling the American people the truth. The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us. Our Republicans did this to us, too. Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt. Our kids are never going to forgive us for this. Look at the 2024 budget: Republicans asked for $7.4 billion in earmarks. Democrats asked for $2.8 billion. So you tell me, who are the big spenders? I think it’s time for an accountant in the White House.
Let’s find consensus. Can’t we all agree that we should ban late-term abortions? Can’t we all agree that we should encourage adoptions? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be available? And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?
Nikki Haley in the Wednesday GOP Presidential “debate.” Her stock is rising in my estimation. (Source).
Surprise support for Big Orange
Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon had some very supportive comments about Voldemort, a/k/a Big Orange:
Trump’s accomplishments were … vast on behalf of the working class. To ask people to not vote for a man who immeasurably improved their lives, who made this country feel like it cared about them for the first time in generations, who put money in their bank accounts, and for the first time made the American dream feel like something they could start dreaming about again—to ask them not to vote for him is not just ridiculous. None of those people onstage are able to quite understand the complexity. These people are not voting for Trump because they think he’s moral. They’re voting for him because it is undeniable what he accomplished and because he represented their future.
…
The GOP base is the working class, and the working class is not hardcore … There is a huge divide in the GOP between what the donor class wants, which is the fight against wokeness, and what the voter base wants, which is an economy that works for the hardest-working Americans.
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 a big fan of Paul Kingsnorth, reading and listening to a lot of his last two years of opining. At least as regards his conversion to Christianity, Gavin Ashenden’s inteview of him seems unsurpassed. Highly recommended.
Golf
I’m glad that I’ve always hated golf. It makes hating golf today easier.
The presentation was both jaw-droppingly impressive and oddly underwhelming. The Vision is stuffed with innovations that eclipse every other headset on the market. Clunky joysticks are out, hand gestures and eyeball tracking are in. Instead of legless avatars, users get photorealistic likenesses, whose eyes also appear on the outside of the glasses to make wearing them less antisocial. The product is dusted with Apple’s user-friendly design magic.
Yet the company had strangely uninspiring suggestions for what to do with its miraculous device. Look at your photos—but bigger! Use Microsoft Teams—but on a virtual screen! Make FaceTime video calls—but with your friend’s window in space, not the palm of your hand! Apple’s vision mainly seemed to involve taking 2D apps and projecting them onto virtual screens (while charging $3,499 for the privilege). Is that it?
… media culture is simply a redo of high school where some of the sad and lonely kids have tried to invert the popularity pyramid and become the new bullies.
Freddie de Boer on mainstream media’s personal antipathy toward Bari Weiss.
Reeking hypocrisy
So: Washington and NATO … insist that Ukraine is a sovereign nation that has the right to join a great power alliance hostile to next-door Russia, and if Russia doesn’t like it, too bad. Also: Cuba is a sovereign nation that has no right to cooperate with a great power hostile to nearby America, and if the Cubans go forward with this, there will be consequences.
Do you not see the reeking hypocrisy of this? Do you not recognize the quagmire that the US foreign policy establishment, both Republican and Democratic, has led us into? They are dragging us into world war. Believe me, the rest of the world recognizes the arrogance of all this.
I agree with Dreher except I don’t know that there will be world war. That will depend on how badly our “defense” industries want it.
Long time since I read anything she wrote
Somewhere in the media right now (probably MSNBC), someone is talking about Dylann Roof, the monster who murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina. That happened eight years and three presidents ago. But mass shootings this year keep mysteriously disappearing from the news.
January: two mass shootings of Asians in California just days apart, including the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles history. Eighteen killed in all. Gunmen in both cases Chinese immigrants, Huu Can Tran and Chunli Zhao.
The end!
February: Active shooter at Michigan State University kills three students, sends five to hospital. Gunman: Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old black man.
The end!
March: mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Gunman: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender.
The end!
But she left a manifesto!
Media: Go away. We’re not interested.
April: horrific shooting at a 16-year-old’s birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, leaving four dead — three of them teenagers — and wounding 32 others. Arrested: Johnny Letron Brown, Willie George Brown Jr., Wilson LaMar Hill, Travis McCullough and Tyreese McCullough.
The end!
Last day of April: slaughter of five family members, including a 9-year-old boy, all shot execution-style, in Texas. Arrested: an illegal from Mexico.
The end!
Would covering stories like these turn CNN into a “right-wing” network? Only if facts are “right-wing.”
I was surprised for two reasons to read a claim that the late Pat Robertson was a Baptist minister.
First, I was under the strong impression that he had no ordination as a clergyman an any denomination. But the New York Times delivered half the goods on that claim by recounting his resignation from Southern Baptist ministry in 1987 to run for President in 1988. The half they didn’t deliver was whether, having resigned, the Southern Baptist world or the evangelical world more broadly would still have considered him a “Reverend.” I doubt it; I’m pretty sure they don’t have anything like the Roman Catholic view that the character imprinted by ordination is forever (indelible).
Second, I would have suspected that if he did have ministerial credentials, it would have been in the Assemblies of God or another pentecostal denomination, because his television schtick so often veered off into very un-Baptist speaking in tongues, faith-healing, personal revelations and other woo-woo.
I never liked him or respected him (except in the sense that “the guy really knows how to monetize credulity”). The woo-woo made him seem creepy, because I doubted that he believed it. I probably was wrong, and wrong in a sense that says as much bad about me as about him.
He was consequential. Mainstream newsrooms may not have grokked him any more than I did, but it seems to me that he was mainstream within evangelicalism (by the time he was a big deal, I didn’t consider myself part of that mainstream and I could be wrong). So far as I know, he never was exposed in any scandal — unlike too many too many others, some of whom took me in to one degree or another.
I’m convinced in a low-stakes, not-worth-investigating-further sense. (I have been in “dirt-poor Mekheti,” by the way.) It has the distinct advantage of lending itself to “Putin’s a real bastard” jokes.
When the criminal justice system goes terribly wrong, it’s rarely the fault of a single bad actor. A wrongly conviction typically includes errors or malfeasance by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the courts, not to mention possible contributions from crime lab analysts and other expert witnesses. Even a bad shootings by a single police officer are usually the product of institutional failure. Was the officer trained properly? What was the officer’s personnel history? Should the officer have been fired for previous misconduct? Does the police department use an early warning system to flag potentially abusive or trigger-happy officers? If not, why not? If so, why wasn’t that officer flagged?
A sentinel event review, or SER, is an attempt to dig into and correct these institutional failures. The idea is to bring in all the relevant parties to get at the root of what caused an outcome that everyone agrees is unacceptable.
The inspiration for the idea comes from two fields outside of criminal justice: the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations of plane and train crashes, and the morbidity and mortality (M&M) reports hospitals conduct after medical errors, such as amputating the wrong limb or administering the wrong medication.
NTSB and M&M reviews don’t look to blame on individual actors. Because of this, they tend to get better participation from the parties and institutions involved. But the reviews don’t confer immunity onto anyone, either. If there are individuals who merit blame and discipline, they can still be held accountable or liable by parallel investigations by other authorities.
The aim of a sentinel event review is to figure out what went wrong and why — to get at the systemic errors that allow catastrophic events to happen, and to make policy recommendations to reduce the chances those events will happen again ….
Affirmative Action
When majorities discriminate against their own kind, as largely white universities did in the early days of affirmative action, it may not feel like a “bad” kind of discrimination. It may not feel like discrimination at all. It may even feel like magnanimity. But the biracial historical context that used to tug at consciences, pushing admissions officers (and the parents of rejected students) to a more indulgent understanding of affirmative action, is gone.
After half a century of high immigration, the United States has become a multiracial country and affirmative action has turned into a different kind of program. Building “diverse” student bodies now requires treating Asian overrepresentation as a problem to be solved.
The other Justices try their level best to apply longstanding doctrine to complicated cases. But Justice Thomas, at every opportunity, starts from first principles, and urges us to reconsider everything. And these opinions will ripple out for years to come.
I detest Pride Month, the High Holy Days of the LGBT+ Religion, to which we’re all now expected to bend the knee.
There. I said it.
But when I saw gay NYT columnist Charles Blow declare that “Yes, We’re in an L.G.B.T.Q. State of Emergency” because “This year, there is a pall over Pride,” I just had to read it. And I’ve got to say that it’s just as stupid as I expected.
There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2023 there have been more than 525 such bills introduced in 41 states, with more than 75 bills signed into law as of June 5. In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.
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For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.
This is a reason why the expression “first world problems” still bites.
The Human Rights Campaign, which should have shut down after it accomplished its goal with the Obergefell decision, has gone on to grift the transgender cause instead. It has all the credibility of co-grifter Southern Poverty Law Project’s listing of hate groups — namely: none whatsoever. But mainstream media treat both HRC and SPLC as if they were bona fide arbiters.
Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend. I cannot endorse all that cet animal does to se defend, but I understand the impulse to draw lines and reclaim territory occupied by extremist sexual revolutionaries. And I understand that war is always ugly.
National Emergency
Andrew Sullivan isn’t buying what Charles Blow is selling either:
For the first time since it was founded in 1980, the Human Rights Campaign — the largest group claiming to represent gay men and lesbians and trans people in the United States — has declared a “national emergency.”
They didn’t do this when the federal government refused to act quickly against AIDS in the mid-1980s; they didn’t do it as over 300,000 gay men subsequently died; they didn’t do it when Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or when George W Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment. But now that gay men and lesbians have won the civil right to marry in all 50 states, and transgender Americans have the full protection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and public support for marriage equality is over 70 percent, we are in a “national emergency.”
Why? Because some states have drawn the line at experimental sex-changes for children with gender dysphoria, and removed materials rooted in critical queer and gender theory from public school libraries from kindergarten upwards. That’s the “emergency.”
(I was relieved to see that Sullivan shares my general impression of Charles Blow, this particular column aside: “Blow is not the sharpest of tacks.”)
What’s up?
The agonising wait is finally over. At last we can rejoice. Yes, June is here, bringing with it the occasional bout of warmer weather, barbecues, and of course Pride Month—a chance for us all to turn our attention to gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights, which have been completely off the agenda for the past 11 months. The suspense must be killing you to discover what the rainbow community has been up to during our last trip around the sun? Let me put you out of your misery: the LGBT acronym continues to grow, as more and more sexual identities decide they’d like to be part of a tiny, oppressed minority.
Trump needs no reason to defy the law and obstruct justice; he is not some criminal genius, or devious plotter. He is just characterologically incapable of obeying the rule of law if his ego ever gets a smidgen in the way.
That’s why he leaned on Ukraine to prosecute Biden; it’s why he refused to accept a legitimate election defeat; it’s why he fomented an insurrection; it’s why he simply could not follow the rules for classified documents; and could not cooperate properly with the FBI. Any system where he is just one among equals — even if those equals are other presidents — is one he simply does not and cannot comprehend. He has to violate any system based on equality with his peers, or any system he cannot fully control. Without that, he disintegrates. That’s why he is, and always has been, unfit for office in a democratic system under the rule of law.
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I’d hoped we could find a way around this. I was eager for an alternative Republican, or a younger Democrat to emerge. But Trump and his enemies won’t let us move past him, and he has now all but secured the nomination of his party, and set up yet another showdown for the soul of the republic in 2024. Up against him: a frail, meandering octogenarian whom 70 percent of Americans don’t want to run again.
Note that those first two paragraphs are not just colorful invective. They are a colorful indictment on ephiphenomena of Trump’s narcissism, his fundamental disqualification for the Presidency.
Trumpiest “stupid and avoidable” scandal yet
“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
— Trump August 18, 2016 (Charlotte NC rally)
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Superficially, the Stormy Daniels mess that got him indicted in Manhattan is a “Trumpier” scandal than concealing sensitive government information. There’s infidelity, a porn star, hush money, all the sordid, embarrassing things you’d expect from a guy who spent his adulthood jungled up with the sleaze merchants at the National Enquirer.
The documents scandal is Trumpier, though, because of how stupid and avoidable it was. “Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so,” Mitt Romney said today, succinctly and correctly. The feds spent more than a year cajoling him to hand over the hundreds of sensitive documents he’d taken, an indulgence they wouldn’t have granted to anyone else in American life. He resisted anyway, per the reporting, and may even have instructed aides to hide documents on the day before the FBI visited Mar-a-Lago. He’s now facing at least one count of obstruction of justice.
Why did he take this insane risk, exposing himself to criminal jeopardy that could lead to him dying in prison? The most compelling theory is that … he just didn’t want to give the documents back. He’s never distinguished between the perks of public office and his personal interests, an authoritarian quirk that sets him apart even from wannabes like Ron DeSantis. He kept the documents because he wanted them; they’re “cool,” as he reportedly put it in newly revealed audio recorded in July 2021.
Trump has offered several competing explanations for what he did and why he did it. That makes me suspect he’s guilty. If I’m accused of robbing a bank and I say, in no particular order, “I couldn’t have robbed it, I wasn’t there”; “I was there but I had nothing to do with the robbery”; “what happened wasn’t a robbery and lots of other people did what I did”; the “FBI is framing me”; and “as president I had total authority to take money out of that bank,” I don’t think I have to take any of your denials very seriously because they contradict each other. Trump has floated versions of all of these, from “they planted evidence,” to “of course I did it because I can.”
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Sen. Josh Hawley, America’s self-proclaimed champion of “manhood,” responded to the news last night: “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic.”
Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was the head of the Federalist Society, presumably knows the difference between text and subtext. On the text, he’s right. If the people in power could jail their political opponents “at will” you wouldn’t be able to say we have a republic. The subtext, however, isn’t merely asinine, it’s dangerously asinine.
Peruse the newspapers: You’ll find nothing about Donald Trump being put in jail. You know why? Well, because he hasn’t been and he’s not about to be (and I’m agnostic that he should be, even if proven guilty in a court of law). More importantly, the people in power can’t put Trump in jail “at will.” Trump has to have his day in court. The state has to bring evidence. It has to cite relevant law. A jury and judge have to be persuaded. That’s the rule of law. That’s what makes us a republic, as Hawley claims to understand the word. But that’s the opposite of what Hawley wants you to think is happening. He wants you to think due process and the application of law aren’t happening and that he is one of the last honest men—along with Donald Trump—in a banana republic.
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Let’s take the Hillary Clinton talking point at face value. She wasn’t charged with a crime and that shows that there’s a double standard for Democrats and Republicans. Let’s stipulate—not that difficult a stipulation—that she should have been. Okay, so does that mean no Republican should ever be charged with a crime, too? Do you think that if one bank robber avoids prosecution for political reasons, all bank robbers—or your favorite bank robbers—should be exempt from prosecution? In other words, the people shouting “banana republic!” aren’t against banana republics, they just want a banana republic on their terms.
And they want this for what? Donald Trump? What the f— is wrong with you people?
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It all reminds me of the parable of the drowning man.
Imagine there was a political afterlife for Republican politicians. They get to the Pearly Gates and say to God, “Why did you let Donald Trump kill my political career?” God might reply: “Oh my Me! What are you talking about? I sent you the Access Hollywood tape, a porn star, two impeachments and a bunch of indictments, and you refused to take the lifeline.”
I thought Jonah’s colleague Sarah Isgur did a good job of describing the political quandary, and some ways out, for the rest of the GOP presidential field, as part of Indictment Watch: Trump Charged in Classified Docs Probe.
“Closet normals” in the GOP
From the dawn of the Trump age, I’ve argued that the GOP has been full of “closet normals,” or people who know that Trump is unfit for the job but refuse to say so publicly or do anything about it. Well, that’s not Christie anymore. Most of the candidates are running as closet normals, willing to put a toe or maybe a whole foot outside the door. Christie is running fully out of the closet.
Think of it this way: Imagine if Christie were willing to let me vent my frustrations at him and I did so, reading him the riot act. And he responded, “Okay, what do you think I should do about it?” I might say something like, “tell the truth about the guy” or “go after him full-tilt.” Well, he’s doing that. I don’t know if it’s mostly penance or ambition—I have to assume it’s both—but he’s the one GOP candidate willing to deliver the full indictment.
“Normal” in “closet normal” seems to mean “craven careerist, who loves being in power more than he/she loves truth.”
Will Trump’s judge monkeywrench the case against him?
There has been a suggestion that the Federal Judge hearing the classified documents case against Trump is a partisan hack — a Trump appointee in 2020 who already committed pretty obvious reversible error in Trump’s favor in a related case.
Attorney Ken White (“Popehat”) is very concerned that she may monkey-wrench the case against Trump, but still thinks it should have been brought. Among his reasons for proceeding even if the judge (who fairly predictably was going to get the case) is extremely biased in favor of Trump:
[S]ome judges will always be partisan, and some politicians will seek to appoint or elect partisan judges. It’s not fair. But nobody promised you it would be fair. Deciding not to prosecute because of the risk of biased judges cedes justice to them and also relieves them of the consequences of being biased — public opinion, opinion of their colleagues, reputation, and legacy. It lets them be biased cost-free. If you confront bias, and force judges to be biased in the daylight, it’s harder for them, and social and cultural factors may deter them.
I hope Popehat’s fears prove unfounded. I’m very proud that Judges appointed by Trump stood firm against his post-election bullshit in 2020 and early 2021, and I’m hopeful that the same thing will happen again.
Irony intended.
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.
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.
O Lord and Master of my life, Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk. But grant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother …
(Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, recited over and over and over again, with prostrations, by Eastern Orthodox Christians during Lent.)
I’ve tended for many decades now to discuss things, outside of clearly religious contexts, in non-religious terms. It’s not from any effort to deceive, but instinctive. I guess I’ve absorbed by osmosis the Rawlesian dogma that public discourse requires public reason.
(Lest I now deceive, I acknowledge that many of the terms in the preceding paragraph are debatable, starting with the dubious category of “religion.”)
But I caught myself the other day attributing my increasing patience to my advancing (age and thus the accumulation of anecdotes where I was wrong, someone else right).
But I’m not so sure. Two geezers within the past week or two have impatiently shot innocent people who mistakenly approached their homes. Apparently “older” and “more patient” don’t necessarily go together.
Might my increasing patience have something to do with now 25 years of that prayer?
I’ve only got one life to live. I cannot scientifically separate those prayers, and a quiet divine response, from all else that has accompanied my life. But the concept of “crotchety old man” makes me suspect that mere aging, even self-reflective aging, does not alone explain patience and tolerance.
Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu
Even the staunchest Christians in Greece refer to Socrates as “the Apostle to the pagans.” The best-loved Greek saint of the 20th century, St. Nektarios of Pentapolis, said that Socrates and “divine Plato” were at times “inspired by God.” If the Greek philosophers can be honored in this way, cannot also Lao Tzu, who came even closer than they to describing the Logos, the Tao, before he was made flesh and dwelt among us?
The stringency of Christianity’s sexual teachings gets most of the press, but the commandment against avarice, if taken seriously, can be the faith’s most difficult by far. You can wall yourself off from pornography and avoid people who tempt you into adultery, but everybody has to work—and every day in the workplace is a potential occasion of sin. The prosperity gospel does away with this anxiety. Like most heresies, it resolves one of orthodoxy’s tensions by emphasizing one part of Christian doctrine—in this case, the idea that the things of this life are gifts from the Creator, rather than simply snares to be avoided, and that Christians are expected to participate in the world rather than withdraw from it.
The Egyptian church father next explains why God did not merely save mankind by way of a simple declaration of a clean bill of health. Our cure, Athanasius declares, requires more than merely a spoken word. Salvation, for Athanasius, is not just an external or nominal matter; it is a participatory – or real – event.
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation
Emotivism
If you don’t know who Eric Metaxas is, you may just want to skip this one as I’m not sure you need to know.
The thing is, a heck of a lot of Americans, both on the Left and the Right, have done the same thing. Over forty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre identified “emotivism” as the default moral reasoning position of the contemporary West. That is, we have become the kind of people who believe that truth is what we feel it is. By now, we have created a culture built on emotivism. In one extreme expression of it, we say that an individual can determine his or her sex based not on their body and their genetic profile, but entirely on their feelings. I hope Eric Metaxas and Caitlyn Jenner met in a green room somewhere, and were friendly, because they have a lot more in common than either might have thought.
If you make the pursuit of truth your telos, you might not ultimately find it — truth can be elusive — but you stand a good chance of keeping your integrity, even if you fall into deceit. But if you place fear of the crowd above the pursuit of truth, as Fox did, or live by an emotivist epistemology in which you never analyze your emotional response, as Eric Metaxas did, well, it’s likely to cost you plenty.
On the other hand, last September, Eric released a book titled, Letter To The American Church, in which he goes all Bonhoeffer in calling on US Christians to resist evil. Hey, that’s a message I can endorse! But coming from him? The Upper East Side dandy who exhorted American Christians to shed blood to defend Donald Trump’s election lies?
Rod Dreher, Eric Metaxas And The MAGA Inner Ring. I bought Metaxas’ latest book out of curiosity, and it is truly very bad. My eyes don’t light up at the utility of “emotivism” to explain it, but I have no better summary.
If there is any coherent philosophy behind Metaxas’ strange and vehement Christianish fixations, it must be akin to that of the New Apostolic Reformation folks:
that the offices of Apostle and Prophet still exist; and
that those offices come willy-nilly on whomever the Lord chooses, not by any orderly and ecclesial process.
The NAR folks, however and so far as I know, don’t write letters “to the American Church” haranguing their fellow-Christians that they’re stupid, evil, complicit, crypto-Nazis if they don’t believe the writer’s private revelations.
Other stuff
Game recognizes game
Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle.
There are few ideas, tropes, narratives, myths—whatever you want to call them—more enduring than the notion that very rich people are villainously pulling strings behind the scenes to do villainous things.
I want to be clear: It’s a bipartisan tendency. But the chief difference between right-wing and left-wing versions is that the left-wing versions are treated as serious theories by establishment journalists, academics, and experts while the right-wing versions are usually dismissed as paranoid or bigoted fantasies by those very same academics and experts. “The Koch brothers are behind this!” is acceptable political rhetoric, but, “Soros is behind this!” is antisemitic paranoia. (Yes, antisemites use Soros as a foil, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t meddling in American politics.)
There’s a story about the USA being dedicated to human equality and dignity from (at least) the time of the Declaration of Independence.
The story is nearly universal, and it’s rhetorically useful in politics, and I dare say denying it would be a political kiss of death in almost every congressional district in the country.
But it is false.
The Declaration of Independence was not a statement about human rights in the abstract; it was not a declaration of concrete human rights, either. As the title tells us, it is not about rights at all; it is about independence. It was written at a specific moment and for a specific purpose, designed to do two things: to announce that the American colonists were throwing off allegiance to the British Crown and to justify that act.
Thus the 3/5 clause (slaves counting as 3/5 of a person) in the Constitution was not a solecism on the grammar of the Declaration. If you can face up to that, you can take solace that we now are formally dedicated to equality, as a result of the Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. (I would even say we are so madly dedicated to equality that we ignore truly relevant distinctions and increasingly ignore several rights that entitle people to opt out of the equality regime. But that’s a topic for another day.)
I’m not 100% on board with Roosevelt on everything, but having just finished, at age 74, my first actual reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that block quote dovetails not only with the vision of the little woman who wrote the book that started [a] big war, but with some threads of legal realism I’d previously picked up. When you see multiple “data points” pointing in the same direction, you can’t help but feel that you’re onto something.
It was always the race problem
God, it was always the [race problem], now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man: the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.
We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind. In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
A brief digression
I had paid exactly zero attention to the Dylan Mulvaney kerfuffle. It had peripherally thrusted itself onto my attention a time or two — just enough that I probably could have told you that Dylan Mulvaney was a “trans woman” who did a Budweiser ad, and the some people had their knickers in a knot over it.
But then Andrew Sullivan weighed in, and my default position is that if he takes the time to write about something, it’s probably worth a little of my time to read it.
I won’t say that I was richly rewarded, but I learned some more about Dylan Mulvaney including Andrew’s theory:
There is, in fact, a perfect word to describe Dylan Mulvaney. She isn’t trans or queer or subversive so much as a minstrel. She’s performing a deeply misogynistic version of a Disney princess for an audience that is uncomfortable with actual transgender people whose appearance is not monetizable and whose lives are more than gay parodies of blonde ditzes. But minstrelsy has always been lucrative — and I don’t fault Dylan for seeing an opening here, and succeeding beyond what must have been his/her wildest dreams.
What I worry about is what happens to Dylan as this buzz eventually wears off. She’s only 26, and has a lifetime to live after her 12 months of TikTok fame. The future may not be as pretty as she currently is.
I shall now, I hope, be able to return to ignoring this constellation of unedifying provocations and counter-provocations.
MAID is inexpensive, completely effective, and easily delivered. If we do not resist it, the system will, as if pulled by gravity, increasingly provide suicide and euthanasia instead of healing for the poor, elderly, and severely ill.
[A]n ideology is a conceptual system that oversimplifies reality while claiming to explain it comprehensively, and that justifies its political rule by insisting that, if social and political reality could just be made to conform to its conceptual schema, all problems would be resolved … Part of the “real nature of all ideologies” is that, not only do they misrepresent reality, but they are necessarily in active conflict with it.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Modern households with no shared good can end up feeling this way, with each of the members going off to pursue their own aims. Returning, they can only robotically ask, “How was your day?”
This phenomenon is one reason some describe New Urbanist communities as “creepy.” New Urbanist development Seaside, Florida was chosen as the set for “The Truman Show” because it does such a good job at creating the material presentation of a community, while giving some the sense that it is not quite real. Good urbanism, and Seaside is a nearly perfect example, can certainly bring people together, but one must admit that the pattern of causation is a bit backwards.
Phillip Bess, in his important book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, throws cold water on the aspirations of his fellow urbanists, saying that “something more than urban form is going to be required for a genuine renewal of traditional urbanism. To what extent do the realities of contemporary life even allow for, let alone encourage, a new traditional architecture and urbanism?”
We may be able to build Mayberry architecturally, but if it didn’t arise from a real community pursuing a real common good, it would only be a theme park—just a soulless Frankenstein’s monster of urban form. Individualists living in these well-designed neighborhoods may appreciate their beauty, but they will only be lonely individualists mimicking life in a healthy human settlement, like the strangers sharing a home.
Fifty years ago, few would have predicted that the American South would emerge as an economic dynamo — and that people would be flocking to places like South Carolina and Tennessee, but it’s happening.
So can we tell a simple story here: Republican policies work, Democratic policies don’t?
Well, not quite. When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states. The growth is in the metro areas — which are often blue cities in red states.
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If you look at these success stories you see they are actually the product of a red-blue mash-up. Republicans at the state level provide the general business climate, but Democrats at the local level influence the schools, provide many social services and create a civic atmosphere that welcomes diversity and attracts highly educated workers.
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We know the policy mix that creates a dynamic society. We just don’t yet have a party that wants to promote it.
Don’t ask who’s funding all the disinfo lists: The nonprofits affiliated with the Global Disinformation Index are hiding just about everything they can. Typically, in exchange for the tax benefits of being a nonprofit, these groups are required to disclose information about leadership and funders. Not the ones around the GDI, which has been a central player in the new censorship efforts and now cites “harassment” as the reason they need to stay super private. From a great Washington Examinerinvestigation:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 990 that excludes the names of officers and directors,” said Alan Dye, a partner at Webster, Chamberlain & Bean who has specialized in nonprofit law since 1975. “And I’ve looked at hundreds.”
Some legislatures, apparently having nothing better to do, are playing with Bills to exonerate those convicted of witchcraft in the 17th century. But they’re meeting some resistance in Connecticut:
The fear in Connecticut, as Republican senator John Kissel put it, is that a precedent would be set; that we would “have to go and redress every perceived wrong in our history”. Similar concerns have been expressed elsewhere. A journalist writing in the Scottish newspaper The Herald worried that pardons vilify accusers and that “we should not judge people for living in the past”.
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Yet, it remains reasonable to ask: how can we exonerate a crime that modern society no longer believes exists? This is a question not just of history, but of jurisprudential ethics. An empirically supported understanding of “the great witch-craze” should inform questions of whether we need to act, and if so what to do. Are we quashing what now seem like unsafe convictions of witchcraft or offering modern pardons for contemporaneously just ones?
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If we are to exonerate convicted witches, we must ensure that the process is historically rigorous. It undermines the enterprise if, say, we set out to pardon five million people tried for witchcraft when, in fact, we have evidence for only around 100,000. We should know that our ancestors were surprisingly sceptical and wary about pointing the finger, and that across continental Europe about half of trials resulted in acquittal. In England and Connecticut, it was more like 75%, owing to the caution of judges and juries about passing guilty verdicts where the proof for this most secretive crime amounted to little more than hearsay.
C.S. Lewis once observed that it’s no great moral advance that we no longer execute witches — because the reason for our ceasing is that we no longer believe that witchcraft is real.
That’s a bit like the people who can never claim to be tolerant because they say they like (or even love) those they tolerate; you actually need to dislike something in order to tolerate it.
In that vein, I freely admit that I dislike drag, and always have; I nevertheless tolerate it as a lesser evil than suppressing marginal uses of free expression.
But what do I know? …
Somebody from a developing country said to me, “what we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.”
The U.S. lecture probably will be about “tolerance” of every flavor of sexual practice, preference, orientation, or line-blurring. By “tolerance” will be meant “enthusiastic approval and suppression of those who dissent.”
I suspect that a major motivator for America’s tolerance toward sexual deviance from norm is that it allows for a Pharisaical attitude in attention-misdirecting from our own sexual transgressions:
I’ve written in this blog numerous times about the “revenge of conscience. Conscience wreaks this revenge in a particularly spectacular way in the domain of sex. We aren’t really shameless; rather, because of our shame, we make excuses. People on the left make excuses for their shameful practices by saying that now all perversions are okay (in fact, they aren’t perversions). People on the right implausibly say “No, only my shameful practice is okay. Yours isn’t.” Is it any wonder that the liberal dog is winning this fight?
Welcome to the radical middle, Ana Kasparian: Prominent leftist media personality and cohost of The Young Turks Ana Kasparian recently made enemies within her tribe by saying it was kind of annoying to be called a birthing person and that she’d like to be called a woman. The fallout continued this week as her request is literal violence and means. . . Ana Goes to Gulag! Ana Goes to Gulag!
[A] 65,000 square foot downtown [San Francisco] Whole Foods closed, citing staff safety concerns. (A man had died in their bathroom; also, every single shopping cart had been stolen.)
The term drug dealer is super stigmatizing. Please call them drug workers, says Canadian PhD student.
[Ken Griffiths’ $300 million dollar] gift basically funds Harvard qua Harvard, carrying coals to the Newcastle that is the school’s almost bottomless endowment, which even by ineffective-altruist standards seems indefensibly useless and pathetic. Even if Griffin’s interests were ruthlessly amoral and familial — all-but-guaranteed admission for all his descendants, say — the price was ridiculously inflated: The Harvard brand and network might be worth something to younger Griffins and Griffins yet unborn, but not at that absurd price. And if he’s seeking simple self-aggrandizement, he won’t gain it, since nobody except the chatbot in charge of generating official Harvard emails will ever refer to the “Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.” (At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument along the Charles, Ken!)
The sheer unimaginativeness makes Griffin’s gift a useful case study in one important ingredient in our society’s decadence: the absence of ambition or inventiveness among of our insanely wealthy overclass when it comes to institution building. There was a time when American plutocrats actually founded new institutions instead of just pouring money into old ones that don’t need the cash. And for the tycoon who admires that old ambition but thinks playing Leland Stanford is too arduous these days, there are plenty of existing schools that could be revived and reconfigured, made competitive and maybe great, with the money that now flows thoughtlessly into the biggest endowments.
Today, the World Economic Forum imagines that AI will lead us to a less primitive “utopia”, a 21st-century Promised Land in which people will “spend their time on leisure, creative, and spiritual pursuits”. A safer bet would be drugs and sex robots. Ninety years ago, John Maynard Keynes prophesied, with what looks like eerie accuracy, that machines would make labour obsolete within a century. The prospect filled him with “dread”, because very few people have been educated for leisure.
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In 2018, an article in Scientific Americanpredicted that advanced AI will “augment our abilities, enhancing our humanness in unprecedented ways”. This Pollyannaish prognosis ignores the fact that all human capacities tend to atrophy in disuse. In particular, AI is inexorably changing the way we think (or don’t). Students now use ChatGPT to do their homework for professors who perhaps rely on it to write their lectures. What makes this absurd scenario amusing is not just the thought of machines talking to machines, but that intellectually lazy people would employ a simulacrum of human intelligence for the sake of mutual deception.
Compared with the natural endowment of human intelligence, the artificial kind is an oxymoron, like “genuine imitation leather”. AI is a mechanical simulation of only one part of intelligence: the capacity of discursive thinking, or the analysis and synthesis of information. Discursive thinking deals with humanly constructed tokens, including numerical and linguistic symbols (or, in the case of AI, digitally encoded data). While human intelligence can compare these tokens with the things they represent, AI cannot because it lacks intuition: the immediate cognition of reality that roots us in the world and directs our energies beyond ourselves and the operations of our own minds. It is intuition, for example, that tells us whether our nearest and dearest are fundamentally worthy of trust.
It’s curious that both left and right seem to think that things are falling apart — but what each side views as remedy, the other views as decline. People often say they wish left and right would “come together to solve the country’s problems," but they define the problems in opposite ways. For example, one side thinks that racism is on the increase and reverse racism is necessary to fight it; the other side thinks that racism was on the decline but that reverse racism is bringing it back in force. Again, one side thinks that crime is an innocent response to deprivation, and that the problem lies in the police; the other side thinks crime is wrong and dangerous, and that although we should help disturbed people, the problem lies in punishing the police and encouraging the criminals.
The proponents of the so called “new natural law theory,” or “basic goods theory,” say that we shouldn’t speak of the natural purposes of things. For example, we shouldn’t say that the natural purpose that anchors the sexual powers is procreation, because this “instrumentalizes” and “depersonalizes” us – it makes us tools for making babies. This is absurd. One might as well say that it depersonalizes us to say that the natural purpose of the intellectual powers is deliberating and knowing the truth.
Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. And hey, in college that even got me popularity/a scholarship/pussy! Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation/I need to not have potential Bumble dates see anything controversial when they Google me. Can you throw me a bone? Neither I nor 99% of the self-identified socialists in this country believe that there is any chance whatsoever that we’ll ever take power, and honestly, you’re harshing our vibe. So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?
It would be interesting to see a similar parody featuring a standard-issue Right figure.
Three foundational myths of MAGA
While Trumpism is a complex phenomenon, there are three ideas or principles that are consistently present: First, that before Trump the G.O.P. was a political doormat, helplessly walked over by Democrats time and again. Second, that we live in a state of cultural emergency where the right has lost everywhere and must turn to politics to reverse this cultural momentum. And third, that in this state of emergency, all conservatives must rally together. There can be no enemies to the right.
Add these three ideas together, and you have a near-perfect formula for extremism and authoritarianism.
Having a bit of blood in the water, the media (Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times in particular) will be trying to devour Justice Clarence Thomas until they drive him from office (unlikely since Anita Hill could deny him the office), lose interest, or motivate Congress to enact a binding judicial code of conduct (which Chief Justice Roberts has cautioned might violate separation of powers). Stay tuned.
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.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 