Category: Uncategorized

Out-takes

A plurality of Alabama Republicans nominated Roy Moore, a judge famously removed, twice, from his office as chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, as their candidate in the upcoming election to fill Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat. Moore’s appeal lay mainly in his promise to offend the sensibilities of the great and the good in Washington. He has a talent for saying things that incense the elite—that “the transgenders don’t have rights,” that parts of Illinois and Indiana are under sharia law—but he is not otherwise accomplished. He is a small, countrified Trump.

Now Moore faces credible accusations that he preyed on underage girls, and his circumlocutory denials seem to confirm the allegations’ truth. They won’t end his candidacy, however, because the people who invested most heavily in outsiderism and the benefits of “disruption” can’t bring themselves to believe what everybody else can see clearly: that they’ve backed a fraud …

We understand … that there was never any hope of persuading President Trump to disavow his support for Moore. The president, as he amply proved in his responses to the Charlottesville riots last August, is constitutionally incapable of condemning anyone, no matter how awful, who has praised Donald J. Trump.

…

This sudden addiction to troublemaking has been called “populism,” and maybe it is. The populisms of the past, however, had content—a set of ideas or ideals, however imperfectly expressed. The new populism looks like nothing more than a perverse need to outrage the nation’s bien pensants.

(The Weekly Standard)

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Any doubt about where the Economist stands on this race?

Okay, then: the title is “Doug Jones against the darkness.”

IMG_0364

I long ago ceased being enough of an Anglophile to care what anyone in England thinks. I’ll neither grovel for their approval nor flash them the bird.

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

From my Twitter feed

I’m strongly inclined to agree with Shapiro on that.

By analogy, I am pretty confident it’s possible for a couple to, say, marry before one of them is through college, practice contraception to allow that one the best chance to finish college on time, and not buy into the culture of death by so doing. But if Rome is right on this (which I often wonder), they’re still doing a bad thing, and they’re probably creating cognitive dissonance should they wish later to criticize “the contraceptive mentality.”

A society that decides that contraception should make every child Planned® is a different story.

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I think he’s burned that bridge, but I am regularly amazed at people’s credulity and partisan flip-flopping.

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Let me translate:

One thing the Roy Moore reaction proves: Rod Dreher is totally correct in his Benedict Option book to place no hope for Christian conservatives in the old Religious Right.

He’s got that right. If they’re not uniformly corrupt, politically and morally compromised, the old Religious Right is too full of metastatic corruption and compromise to even hold out hope for them.

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Nothing happened

Somehow, a day passed without anything notable happening.

Well, nothing notable and edifying came to my attention.

The sky continued to fall down around Baton Rouge (here endeth my cryptic allusion, which some of you will get), and some Polish Catholics, with the help of a Jesuit priest, did a profane rap nuptial mass (6:23 pm November 1) that sets back the possibility of Orthodox/Catholic ecumenism by about 25 years.

So I’m going to step back to yesterday’s Performance Today, which reminded me of an earlier encounter (via From the Top) with Gateways Music Festival, a concept surpassingly wonderful, which I’ll let you encounter for yourself, without further ado.

Be edified.

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

Your Friday assignment

Pour yourself your favorite beverage, turn off the cell phone and other distractions, and read the transcript of David Brooks speech to The Gathering in 2014. Nothing I could say would be funnier or of more enduring important than what he said that day.

Take heart! The page at the linked URL has both the introduction and the talk twice, so it’s only half as long as you might think.

How good is it? I had to add five new tags when I saved it: Adam 1, Adam 2, résumé virtues, eulogy virtues and invasive care. (The Gathering’s muse, Michael Cromartie, was a man of many eulogy virtues, as demonstrated by his many heartfelt eulogies, like here, here, here and here).

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

Benedict Option for Dummies

In our conversation last night some of the students expressed some confusion as to what the Benedict Option actually entailed. I said:

1) the culture is increasingly anti-Christian;

2) It’s not going to leave Christians alone;

3) Christians have accommodated too much to the culture, and don’t have the resources to defend themselves;

4) Much of it will get swept away, but that which will be left is purified.

To that list, I would add at least one more:

3a) If you want to know how to dis-accommodate yourself to the culture, and regain the resources to defend yourself (and your loved ones), here are some examples of how others are doing it. Do any of them fit? Could they be tailored to fit?

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Blue Funk

I have been in a pretty foul mood and don’t have anything edifying to say without making my head explode to find it. If you’re looking for uplift, click this link to Upworthy and then close this browser tab.

Two items about Robert Jeffress are among the sources of my funk:

Robert Jeffress is Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, a megachurch right downtown where it’s always been, last I knew. Once upon a time, it was a Evangelical beacon of sorts, but that’s when W.A. Criswell was the pastor — a man with notably more integrity than the current pastor, and before the Moral Majority, when Evangelicals were guiltier of insularity than of idolatry.

Here’s the YouTube of the Jeffress/Hannity abomination (the allusive “abomination” replaces a crude slang term).

I’m going to schedule this for publication Monday morning and then go to Middle Earth. Frodo has figured out that he must destroy the ring. Our situation may be more dire.

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

Is “Classical Liberalism” Conservative?

The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday essays sometimes are real gems, and October 14 was one of those times. If you can get through the paywall, by all means take the time to read Yoram Hazony’s Is ‘Classical Liberalism’ Conservative?

There’s nothing really new in it factually or historically, but it gives a welcome reminder and, for me at least, sticks a helpful pin on the political map that says “you are here” — vital information for getting out of the woods since I aspire not merely to stay there and curse the trees.  

In a very brief and inadequate summary, Hazony (author of a forthcoming book praising nationalism) contrasts conservative empiricism (and implicit incrementalism) with the crypto-imperialist “universal reason” ideology of classical liberalism. It’s important to note the adjective “classical” in “classical liberalism” because our putative conservatives have been what I, echoing others who knew the terrain better than I, call “right liberals” in contrast to the left liberals in our Democrat party.

The right- and left-liberals of classical liberalism have been the folks who have created todays chaos in the middle east, which has facilitated the slaughter and expulsion of middle east Christians, with another Copt having been martyred this week. That’s especially offensive to me.

Indeed, it was George W. Bush’s right-liberal Second Inaugural speech that forever broke my identification as a Republican:

We have seen our vulnerability—and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

I saw the preface as McCoy saying why Hatfield is the bad guy, and the bolded phrase as a formula for endless war — which is exactly what we’ve had since before that speech.

It absolutely is not true that I opposed Donald Trump from a preference for Hillary Clinton, or for Democrats over Republicans, or for left liberals over right liberals. My opposition to Donald Trump as President has been based on his narcissism, demagoguery, and lack of any discernible and predictable political policies.

But putting a reasonably benign interpretation on the election, Trump voters were motivated partly — and maybe mostly — by opposition to classical liberalism even if, in all likelihood, they don’t know that category by name. They didn’t want one of the Republican field’s sixteen right-liberals. They wanted the guy who fairly consistently opposed classical liberalism’s current instantiation, globalism.

That’s not quite the same as saying they were motivated by classical conservatism, or by any real conservatism that I can recognize, unless “America first” nationalism be “conservative.” But maybe the enemy of my enemy can at least be my co-belligerant for a while, as right-liberals and conservatives made common cause for decades.

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Just shoot me

We are ruled by a bipartisan bunch of buffoons.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth, Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5)

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Trigger-warned

“Natural disasters and their man-made counterparts (mass shootings, terrorist attacks) pose an obvious challenge for those living the Me-Driven Life. These events are frustrating, and inconvenient, because they tend to cause those people to think about their own problems: their injuries, the loss of loved ones, their hunger, thirst, discomfort, life-threatening cholera, what have you.

This is a common character flaw, and it is harmful because it distracts them from their more pressing obligation to think about you ….”

(Dana Milbank, A Narcissist’s Guide to Helping Others Understand It Is All About You)

President Trump is the author of many of the most successful business books of all time, from The Art of the Deal to … um … those other ones. And with his presidency spooling out before us like an endless rainbow of winning, there’s much that leaders of any organization, company, or family can learn about how to make their enterprise function like the “fine-tuned machine” that is the Trump administration.

Perhaps someday Trump will sit down to write a book detailing his leadership secrets, offering up another trove of penetrating insight and inspiring prose. Until then, here are some tips we can glean from watching Trump’s unrivaled performance as president.

1. Force your underlings to praise you in public. This will make them feel like honored parts of the team! It’s a technique Trump often employs, whether it’s a Cabinet meeting or a get-together with a group of religious leaders. He’ll call on them one at a time, knowing that they’ll all feel compelled to give him the hosannas he’s looking for …

(Paul Waldman, Leadership tips from Donald J. Trump)

Why? Why can’t just one religious leader, of all people, have the cojones to say “It’s always an honor to be invited to meet with the President of our nation” and leave it at that?

UPDATE:

The thing I got most wrong is that I did not anticipate the sheer chaos and dysfunction and slovenliness of the Trump operation. I didn’t sufficiently anticipate how distracted Trump could be by things that are not essential. My model was that he was greedy first and authoritarian second. What I did not see was that he was needy first, greedy second, and authoritarian third. We’d be in a lot worse shape if he were a more meticulous, serious-minded person.

(David Frum, The Atlantic, October 2017)

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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.